


What The Thunder Said

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Series: Above Urðr's Well [2]
Category: Thor (2011)
Genre: M/M, Mpreg, Odin's A+ Parenting, Pseudo-Incest, Pseudo-Norse Mythology, movie timeline AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-16
Updated: 2012-12-09
Packaged: 2017-11-03 18:41:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 17
Words: 213,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/384601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Because we all drink of the Well of Urðr,” he says softly, still not looking upward. “You were born just before Father went to Jötunheimr. I was born just after he returned victorious.” And now his eyes are upon his, a wry smile curving up his lips before venturing no further. “You were the beginning. I was the ending. And between us lies the entirety of war.”</i>
</p>
<p>Their time of trial in Vanaheimr was only the prelude to battle. In Asgard, the real war begins.</p>
<p>Entirely unintended sequel to the much shorter and infinitely more readable <i><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/380029">The Fools We Are As Men</a></i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In The Mountains, There You Feel Free

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, I'd like to point something very important out: THIS FIC DOES NOT EXIST. No, really, it doesn't. I have no idea how you're even reading this thing, so much does it not actually exist.
> 
> But if it did, it would be an entirely unintended headlong plunge off the cliffs of insanity into the churning cauldron of WHAT THE FUCK AM I DOING below. This is a sequel to a Norsekink prompt I didn't even intend to write in the first place ~~goddamn enabling fandom~~ and to that end I still don't even know where this is going. I just started writing and this fell out of my head, and I figured we'd start here and see if anyone wanted anything more.
> 
> Bear in mind several things: this fic has SO MANY ELEMENTS of things I would not typically write: these include incest, mpreg, Norse mythology, and most frightening of all: POLITICAL INTRIGUE. I really do need to write outside my comfort zone, of course, but I thought I better warn you up front that that is exactly what is happening here.
> 
> ...may the odds be ever in our favour?

_I know an Ash standing_

_called Yggdrasil,_

_A high tree sprinkled_

_with snow-white clay;_

_Thence come the dews_

_in the dale that fall--_

_It stands ever green_

_above Urðr's Well._

 

 

Loki does not like to be touched. Though this is no revelation, it is not something Thor has ever bothered himself much about. Loki is his brother; he has always existed to be loved in whatever way seems most appropriate to his mind at the time. Even when Loki pulls away, Thor will simply shove himself all closer. It has been that way since childhood, and Thor thought Loki had learned as much long ago.

It is different now. In the company of fully armoured guards they have re-entered the gleaming golden city of their birth, its planes and towers and floating helices almost too bright against their blinking eyes. In some ways they also seem not bright _enough_ , not after the brilliance of the world that had been wrought between them upon the dais. But even though Loki remains at his side, he seems to be slipping away again the closer they come to the throne room and their waiting father.

It would be unseemly, to move through the streets with his brother’s hand in his. But as they come to the palace, as the high doors covered in runes and wards both seen and unseen open wide like a mother’s welcoming arms, Thor reaches out. As they step over the threshold he turns his head, nods just once and his fingers squeeze tight.

“Stay with me, brother,” he says. And after a moment, Loki’s ghost of a smile is answer enough. He lets go, but it is enough for Thor.

For all his earlier reticence, when they stand before the Allfather Loki speaks quick words with even eyes. Neither had bothered to make themselves the slightest bit more presentable, coming directly from the Bifröst to stand at the foot of Hliðskjálf. With head held high Thor himself pulls few punches when he describes the circumstances of their disappearance and their eventual return. There is only one omission – and when Thor remembers Heimdall’s unblinking golden gaze as they had exited the observatory’s vortex he must wonder what the Guardian knows. From their welcome and Odin’s subsequent focus upon the rebel faction he does not think their father quite realises what has passed between his sons.

But as they talk he feels their mother’s eyes rest upon them still. As both shield-maiden and mother both, she had cared not for protocol. As they had entered, each going to one knee before the Allfather with one fist clasped to his breast, she had stood tall at his side. And then when they had risen she had descended with quick purpose to clasp both of her sons to her heart.

She remains at her lord husband’s side now, the blue eyes she shares with her eldest son warm and watchful and waiting. It reminds Thor of when they had been children, sitting at her knee while she spun upon her wheel with soft songs upon her lips. Thor had never been much inclined to sing himself, does now only when he’s had perhaps too much mead. But Loki had always sung with her. He had loved those moments, had been always content to rest his head and allow the mingled voices of mother and brother to lull him to safe and secure rest.

That latter voice rings out through the throne room now, sure over every word and every omission as Loki gives only the information he wishes to share. It is not the time for anything other than sweeping generalisations; the armies are alerted, the borders are guarded, Heimdall has narrowed his Gaze to Vanaheimr and her once-allies. There will be a purging, there will again be war if such trespasses can be neither explained nor atoned for in any other way. For now, there is to be rest, and healing.

But Loki will not go to those chambers. “I am fine,” he insists, even when Frigga lays one hand upon his shoulder and murmurs her concern as they move together from the great arching golden chambers at the heart of their father’s power. “There is nothing wrong with me.”

Thor wants to protest, but he has seen the entirety of Loki’s body and knows at least physically that much is true. Yet physician though he is not, he doubts the healers can do anything for the creeping chaos which lurks yet behind those even-gazed eyes. Such a task falls only to him. It is his responsibility, for Loki is his brother and his other half.

But Loki is drifting again, pulled away by a distant tide that only widens the distance between sun and moon with every passing moment. There is much Loki had not spoken of in the golden halls before their friends and comrades and fellow citizens, but Thor knows there is much more even he himself does not know.

As the still night gathers over Asgard, Thor bathes away the dust and dirt and blood, though he wishes to keep the reminders of Loki’s touch upon his skin. But such gifts can be sought again, and he knows that when he is done he will go to him. Even should Loki bar the door to sit in contemplative solitude as he has done so often before, Thor will not leave him alone. Not this time. There is nothing else in this night he gives a damn for; in the morning, he will take up Mjölnir and seek the end of all those who would bring harm to his home and people. The night exists solely for something deeper and even more unutterably precious. But he is dressing again when the chime comes to tell him that someone seeks entrance to his chambers. The low pulse of it is unmistakably Loki.

He enters as a shadow in almost an entirety of black; there are only the simplest of embellishments of green and gold to him now. The weight he has lost is emphasised by the way even his slim-cut clothes all but hang upon his frame. But he holds his head high, hair lightly damp from his bath.

“Brother,” Thor says, crossing from the great windows before the balcony. Loki holds still, waits for him, though he stands too close to the door for his liking.

“Thor.”

Like iron called to a lodestone Thor goes to him. Loki has never liked to be touched. But Thor is Thor, and he lays a hand upon one pale cheek without hesitation or even true thought. Beneath the high curved bone it is hollowed out and weary, but his eyes are quick above. When Thor leans down, leans close, he finds that Loki tastes of ozone and slow-burning heat.

A sigh against his lips carries only the faintest trace of sound. “You do realise that here, Heimdall will See what he presumably could not before.”

“Your point being?”

“What Heimdall knows, Father will know in short succession.”

“I am still waiting for that promised point of yours.” His palm presses close to that cool skin, lips curving upwards until he just wants to laugh aloud. “Come, Loki, and you are usually so good at this game!”

The soft shake of his head is like the barest tremor of leaves upon the lone tree standing at the eye of a whirling storm. “What happened on Vanaheimr may be left to Vanaheimr.”

“What happened on Vanaheimr is not yet finished,” Thor corrects, “and you and I, we are Aesir.”

One slim eyebrow moves up, something peculiar behind his easy irony. “ _Your_ point being?”

“We are eternal.” Their foreheads press together, a meeting of minds in both flesh and in thought. “And we are what we are.”

For a moment, he hesitates. Touch has never been Loki’s gift, for all he has always been unable to stray far from his brother’s side. But when one long-fingered hand moves to rest upon Thor’s lower arm, he jerks. Immediately he relaxes the reflex, but it is too late. Loki’s eyes flicker and already Thor can sense him drawing back, drawing away.

He reaches out, holds tight. “No. No, Loki, don’t.” He pauses, adds in a tumbled rush: “It’s not what you think!”

Yanking free, his eyes move from a flare to a blaze. “And how do you know what I think?”

“That which passed between us remains inside of us, and you know it. But even without that, we have always been brothers. I believe I might be able to hazard a guess.”

Scorn twists his words, narrows his features – but Thor has known Loki all his life and can feel the low thrum of hurt beneath. “You can’t deny the reaction of your body. You, who are slave to it even as I am slave to my mind.” He thrusts out one hand, disgust writ clear in its wide arch. “My touch is naturally anathema to you.”

And Thor catches it, holds tight. “Loki.” His brother jerks back, the blazing defiance in his eyes merely a mask to hide his misery. And Thor can’t bite back his smile, exasperated and fond as he weaves his fingers relentlessly through his. “Loki, your hands are cold.”

“My hands—” His voice cuts off as he looks down. When he looks up, his despair is almost as brightly burning as his vexation. “ _Thor_. Honestly.”

“They are!” But he does not let go, and in fact raises the hand he has caught to his lips, pressing them over cool knuckles as he bows his head. At this level Thor can see the working of his brother’s throat, the flutter of a quickening pulse – and in those green eyes, golden heat is growing.

“You always were too honest for your own good.”

“And you, the silver-tongued Liesmith.” He smiles against his skin, words like a tattoo. “What have we to fear, Loki? Surely everyone already knows that you and are were meant to be this way. Maybe we were just the last to know.”

Again, his eyes flare, darkness and light smouldering together like uncertain eternity. “Let me show you something.” And that vague sense of unease vanishes as Loki curls his voice like smoke through the brief space between them, rich and spiced and sudden. “Even the coldest hands can bring great heat…if only one knows how to light such fire.”

That is how they come to be naked together on Thor’s bed, him below and Loki atop. The clever tongue once wrapped around his cock now lingers over first one nipple, then the other. But it is something else Thor thinks of, something else he focuses everything upon – and he cannot help it, not with those squirming ice-riddled fingers crooked up inside him, not with that cold teasing pressure against his concealed heat.

The sky outside is roiling and they both know it. Fingertips nudge against the bundle of nerves they know all too well how to find and then how to lose with careful taunting glee. They are ice inside him, but it is not any ice Thor has known before: cleansing, clean, like the fresh-melted water of a glacier descending to the warmer plains to cut a new path between mountain and sky.

And his brother’s lips against his are the taste of the universe made flesh. Thor digs fingers into the furs of his bed, nails dragging into the skins beneath, Mjölnir sparking and singing upon its pedestal. His body echoes it, _amplifies_ it, and the rain pounds the balcony beyond his bedchamber. Then a wrist rotates, a chuckle escapes, and those fingers make a movement both driving and deep.

A flash of light sings across the world blinding and beautiful – and for a moment it hangs eternal, everything in his eyes limned in silver and washed in white. Then comes a crash of thunder that splits the sky asunder and sets the entire palace to trembling beneath them; an echoing cry rips free of his throat and tears across the sky like a tempest unleashed.

After what seems an age Thor relaxes back into the bed, breath coming harsh and hard and heavy. The fingers have been removed, their retreat as slow and amused as the sinuous twist of his brother against his side. Loki’s member is still hard heat against his thigh, though his fingers are cool as he grasps his chin, turns it his way.

“Yes, brother?” Thor asks, lazy, and Loki’s exasperation tastes of apples and ice.

“Do you plan on doing that _every_ _time_ , Thor?”

He grins wider, feeling quite drunk. “Would you take issue with that?”

“I should think Heimdall’s gaze could not have missed it.”

“And I should think I don’t give a damn,” he replies with utter seriousness. “No-one will take you from me, Loki. No-one.”

Not unexpectedly, Loki shies away from the deep and easy power of Thor’s intimacy both in his words, and in the faint shift backwards. “Oh, _that’s_ what this was all about?”

“A subtle reminder,” he says, and not without pride as he tightens a hand upon one hip. Of course Loki just snorts, though he stops moving.

“I doubt even you yourself could name such a vulgar display as _subtle_.”

Perhaps he ought to take offense at the wording, but Thor knows better than anyone that Loki’s words often have little to do with what he actually means. So, he inclines his head, eyes wide and wounded with feigned distress. “And you are surprised at this, brother?”

Loki’s first look is complexity itself, deep in his web of thoughts. Yet when he speaks the answer is as simple as he so often names his brother’s mind: “No.”

Laughter rumbles through his chest, and Thor curves languid limbs more tightly about his cool warmth. “And you, I suppose, could do so much better?”

“Of course.” Superior now, he purses his lips and shrugs slim shoulders. “Although I guess we might never know, given that you are lying all over me like a satiated dog and are obviously too useless to even try making the effort to try to prove me wrong.”

“Oh, don’t be that way,” he replies, reaching out to tangle fingers in sweat-curled hair. “There’s hunt enough in me yet.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’d say that takes all the fun out of it,” he laughs even as Loki bats away his hand from his hair with a frown, “but then I’m just dying to make the kill at the end.” Swallowing the answering laughter whole with his mouth, Thor seeks to give Loki another little death, all sucking lips and slow careful teeth over his brother’s cock until finally it comes: the head thrust back, a back arched, his hair sweat-riddled darkness fallen against the whiteness below. Those beloved green eyes are open wide, wondering and amazed – to Thor’s entranced gaze it seems almost that of a child who had never realised such magic could exist in his own world.

Even as Loki subsides, it does not end. A light touch upon his own skin, tickling and insistent like the low pulse of Loki’s laughter, tilts Thor’s head upward. Then, he knows true wonder. And Loki is chuckling as Thor holds out a trembling palm, blue eyes alight with astonishment.

“It’s…it’s _snowing_.”

“Very good, Thor.” Lazily he raises his arms behind his head, twisting his body in serpentine satisfaction even as the flakes begin to catch upon hipbone and rib, forehead and nose. “Perhaps tomorrow, if you continue to be so very clever, we’ll even learn about rain.”

“That’s my territory, brother.” But he’s staring at the tiny flake he has caught upon his finger, trembling and somehow strange. Touching it to the tip of his tongue he starts, laughs: a spark of electricity flares bright even as its vector melts upon his heat.

“That’s…extraordinary.”

Loki raises an eyebrow. “Did you ever doubt such things of me?”

“Never,” he says, and leans down to snatch all words away with motion before Loki can say anything more. As they melt into one another, pale skin against gold, the snow still falls. It is water touched with lightning, and to him it as if Loki’s touch is everywhere upon his skin.

And he has never known contentment such as this. Yet as they lie together there lurks still the memory of the first time they had wrought such elemental magic with the joining of their bodies. It exists as a shadow between them, for all he thinks his happiness ought to have burned such darkness clean away.

“Loki?”

There is both stillness and silence there, though Thor does not think him asleep. A moment later, he earns a sigh. “Yes?”

“You…” Clumsy, both in emotion and in expression, Thor wonders how his quick-tongued brother has managed to put up with him for so very long. “You have not spoken of…your time in Vanaheimr.”

“You know of my time in Vanaheimr. You were there.”

“Not always.” His throat twists, the words harsh driving guilt. “Not when I should have been.”

Loki’s answer is soft – so much so that Thor almost does not hear tell of it. “When I have need to speak of such matters, I will speak of them.”

“You can bring your need to me,” Thor whispers, and Loki’s eyes are wide and sad and wondering.

“You are always my need, brother.”

In amongst soft drifts of warm snow Thor lets himself steal away to dreamless sleep. He can but hope it to be a gift his mind has somehow managed to share with his brother beside him. Because the day awaits, and though he does not doubt his father will deny the Princes of Asgard their revenge, Thor does wonder if the Allfather will make them fight for the reward they have already claimed in one another.

 

*****

 

Loki is a light sleeper and easily disturbed by company. Therefore Thor knows he should not be hurt when he wakes in the morning to find him gone. Still, there is a distinct sense of loss when he sees the fallen snow has also melted to nothing. For all it ought to be unpleasant to wake to cold and damp, somehow Thor thinks it might have been preferable to warm and dry if only Loki had still been there with him.

His chambers seem the most sensible place to start searching. Whatever else Loki might have chosen to do this early in the morning, bathing and dressing would have been one of the very first things he would have insisted upon. While Thor does not find him there the nearby palace guards have seen him. They hadn’t spoken, they say, and Thor senses a faint sort of awe that bleeds over even into their brief dialogue with him. For the first time he begins to realise that there are those who had begun to believe that the princes and their companions were not going to return from Vanaheimr.

He feels the words as warmth more than hears them as sound when they tell him that Loki had been walking in the company of their mother when he had left, moving towards the library. Yet when he reaches the long rooms with their musty lines of ordered spines upon endless shelves, he is told they parted ways after Loki had collected several spell-tomes. Their mother had returned to her own rooms, and Loki had given the books to a page to take to his chambers as he spoke of the stables.

But Loki is not even there. He has been; one of the stablehands says he had offered to take Sleipnir out to the high meadow for a morning run. When he follows Thor does not bother with a mount of his own. Loki will not have gone far, nor fast. Only the king may ride Sleipnir in these days, and to the best of Thor’s knowledge Loki had never done so even before Odin had raised his second-born’s eight-legged peculiarity to legitimacy as his chosen warhorse.

The dawn is not far gone and the sky over the city becomes a brighter blue with each passing moment. Thor keeps a rapid pace despite the ache of muscles exhausted first by fettering and then by freedom. Odin has summoned them to a war council mid-morning, and though there is time enough he doesn’t truly want to be alone a moment longer than needs be.

He still feels some guilt about coming out here. He knows Loki has always needed his solitude, and while Thor himself prefers company there are others he could seek. Since their return he has not spent much time at all in the company of the Warriors Three or Sif. He tells himself that he will see them soon enough, though Volstagg will not be there; safe as he is in the healing hands it will be some time before he is fit enough to join their quest. Hogun, Sif, and Fandral will be at the þing, and afterwards he thinks they will speak in private of what has passed between them all. First, however, they must safeguard their realm. It is what they have all been born to do.

And his hand tightens about Mjölnir, the hum of its constant presence like liquid lightning in his veins. “And you know that better than any of us,” he murmurs, each word sparking like sudden prophecy. “This is our world. We do what we must to ensure its safety…and our own contentment.”

As he moves out from the confines of a small copse of trees, Thor looks up. Clear skies curve above in a watchful dome, with nothing left of the storm he’d called down the night before. Thor can still feel faint charge upon his skin, can still taste snow upon his lips. Surely their father knows now of those things as yet unsaid – what Thor has given and received, and that such gifts are not those that can be denied nor returned.

Loki is where he expects him to be. The great oak stands at the far end of the meadow where the forest begins in earnest, and from childhood Loki has spent many hours reading beneath its spreading branches. While he has most often done so alone, Thor has upon occasion been known to crave silence, to crave stillness. He always has been able to find both in the company of the mercurial silvertongue, peculiar as such a juxtaposition might seem to those who will never understand the deep mysteries of Odin’s secondborn son.

No book lies open in his hands now. Back against the broad trunk, legs lightly crossed tailor-style, he sits with Sleipnir laid down at his side. The great head rests upon his lap, the barrel-round chest rising and falling with half-sleep. Loki’s eyes are also closed as Thor draws closer through the spring-scented high grasses. He moves gently enough, but with no real effort to be silent. There is no intention of sneaking up on them, and he suspects Loki had felt him long ago when he sighs softly just before Thor’s shadow falls across them both.

“I…missed him.”

He has no idea how to answer that. Loki’s relationship to Sleipnir has always been his own. Knowing his brother’s unwitting involvement in the matter in the first place, Thor has never been able to resent what comfort and affection Loki has found in his firstborn, given the circumstances of his conception. It is more that Thor simply has no idea how to be a part of it.

“A child born to war,” Loki muses quietly, and his eyes flicker open. Their green is deeper than that of the leaves, the grass: somehow both damp and dark as he looks up at his brother. “How many battles, do you think, has Sleipnir ridden out to?”

When there is no answer the number rolls like liquid from Loki’s tongue, salt-laced and warm. Thor frowns even as Loki shakes his head with a low laugh.

“I counted them all.” One hand moves through the thick mane, eyes following the movement of finger and dark hair. “Perhaps I am a fool.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because we all drink of the Well of Urðr,” he says softly, still not looking upward. “You were born just before father went to Jötunheimr. I was born just after he returned victorious.” And now his eyes are upon his, a wry smile curving up his lips before venturing no further. “You were the beginning. I was the ending. And between us lies the entirety of war.”

Though Thor cannot pretend to follow Loki’s train of thought along the same winding paths, he is glad he did not leave Loki to walk such places alone. “And this means…?”

Again his head moves back, forth, back again with all the simple grace of shadow. “How could our children ever hope for another fate?” Thor feels the words like a twisted knife low in his gut, though Loki is more melancholy than frustrated. “Though sometimes…I think I wished for something else for Sleipnir. No, I _knew_ there could be something more. I just…now, it is so indistinct. I try to remember, but I…”

Loki loses his words in the way of the memory he speaks of, and in that Thor feels a deep pang of tragedy. “You have forgotten?”

“The memory of a horse is not the same as the memory of…of an Aesir.”

“Really?” Shifting from one foot to the next, uneasy even in his usually loyal body, Thor does not know what to say either. “You don’t remember any of it then?”

“I remember it.” Though his lips press tightly together, just for a moment, Thor glimpses the tremor that had moved them first. “But not in a way that is easy to explain.”

And now there is rising frustration there, somewhere. But Thor knows it is not against him, and he cannot resent the fact Loki does not seem inclined even to try to tell him what he means. Loki is a shapeshifter by his very nature; he has been prone to such magics as long as Thor can remember. Ostensibly he’d been taught the trick of it, but Thor remembers the glamours and skinwalking Loki had managed even as a child. Such matters had been their little secret, as it were. But it had only been one of many held between them, cradled against the world beyond their fraternity of two – for who else could ever be a better secret-keeper than a brother of blood and bond?

His eyes drift down to Loki’s abdomen, still flat and slim beneath the hard shell of leather and gold. He wants to ask how long it will take. He wants to lay his hands upon him and feel what it is that they have wrought between them, through elemental power and the richest, most potent seiðr Thor has ever known. More than anything, he wants to lay his head there and whisper to both Loki and the spark of life within that no-one will ever part them now. But even though he does not believe it to be knowledge his brother would deny him, not if he asked, somehow here and now it seems private, almost. Because soon it will be so public and everyone will know – but here with Sleipnir’s head in his lap and the day in growing golden light rebirthing all around him, it is a secret coiled up in Loki’s heart and soul – and Thor cannot blame him for wanting to keep it a little longer.

Thor’s own gaze drifts to the firstborn of his brother’s remarkable kaleidoscopic body. Eleven turns of the moon cycle, it had taken. And in all that time Loki had been…not gone, exactly. But the magnificent creature that existed instead in his place had not been the Loki of his childhood, or his adolescence, or even their early adulthood. Instead there’d been something almost wild about him as he’d cantered through the fields and forests without care nor purpose. No-one spoke of saddling him. Perhaps no-one even dreamed of it. Some horses were not for the breaking, and even given the circumstances of this particular horse’s “birth” there was no-one who could deny a truth as simple as that.

In the silence between them now Loki is in his Aesir form with Sleipnir’s drowsing head upon his lap. Yet when Thor looks to his bowed face, dark hair half-fallen forward from its usual ordered calm, that once-wildness seems to have settled about him like a mantle. With it comes that faint sense of intrusion, again, though it isn’t that he feels unwelcome. Instead Thor just feels as if he stands in the wrong place.

“Can I just be here now?” he says, sudden. “With you?”

When Loki looks up his long fingers are wound like the weft of a tapestry through the warp of Sleipnir’s dark mane. Sensing the movement Sleipnir follows his lead, and there is a single blink both from horse and from Loki himself. Shifting, Thor cannot help but think it strange, really: one set of eyes is so liquid and black, the other deep shimmering green. And yet he can so clearly see one in the other, mother and child, a bond unable to be severed even by death itself.

“You always do what you want, Thor,” Loki says, mild, and he cannot help his quiet half-snorted laugh.

“As do you.”

When he sits down, he leans his back against the wide trunk of Loki’s chosen tree and his legs stretch out before him. Even in his light armour and heavy boots there is warmth in the grass, and its rich scent is almost tangible enough to taste. Leaning into his side Thor wraps both arms around Loki’s waist. It invokes a slight stiffening of spine and shoulder, though a moment later Loki sighs and lets his head rest wearily where it falls. One hand still works through Sleipnir’s mane, though it then traces down the long muscles of his neck. Such pale skin stands stark against the ebony coat. Loki had been a dappled mare, Thor remembers. Long-legged and elegant, and well matched to the arrogant toss of the head and the easy movement of flank and wither at full gallop.

Thor moves one palm of his own, open and curved, and rests it over Loki’s flat abdomen. He says nothing in return, though his own hand ceases its movement. Sleipnir gives a faint whinnied sigh, and it resumes. It seems half a spell that he works with those fingers, for Thor feels captivated by the easy affection, the inbred devotion of even so simple a touch. And the coat of the horse, he thinks, is the exact same shade as his brother’s hair.

“I missed you, you know. When you were with foal.”

Loki tilts his eyes up, all green astonishment and lazy accusation. “You tried to ride me.”

“And you threw me halfway across the meadow.”

“ _You tried to ride me_ ,” he repeats, each word distinct with half-feigned outrage; Thor disturbs the lie of his head with an easy shrug.

“Yes, well, Volstagg _had_ encouraged me overmuch with the mead the night before.”

“Only the night before? I garnered the impression you still had a tankard in hand at the time.”

“You threw that, too.” Furrowing his brow in deep contemplation, he adds lightly: “I believe it went further than I did. Likely it’s still out here somewhere, I never did find it.”

Though Loki makes no real effort to answer, Thor can feel the vibration of his half-withheld amusement. Moving his hand upward now, he echoes the play of his brother’s fingers in Sleipnir’s mane, save for the fact that his own fingers are now deep within Loki’s hair. Though he instinctively curves into it, especially when Thor rubs over his scalp, Loki still must have his protest.

“Thor, I am no longer a horse. I would appreciate it if you would not pet me as though I were.”

“It might be better, actually. If you were still a horse, I mean.” When he presses just a little deeper, just for a moment, he is gratified to see Loki cannot contain a little gasp of sudden pleasure. “Then you’d not have the right sort of tongue to complain of ought at all.”

His answering snort is not unlike the most noble of equine efforts. The words that follow are far more those of the quick questing clever trickster he had grown up with, however. “But then I think you’d rather miss my tongue in this form.”

He keeps his tone purposefully airy. “Perhaps.”

“Only _perhaps_ ,” Loki muses, and when he turns to meet that challenge he is dangerously close. Those wide searching eyes hold the faintest hint of a smile, and when Thor lets his own drop down to see if his lips do much the same he discovers he’d much rather know their taste instead. Deepening the kiss, he feels Loki’s free hand drift upward before pulling him even closer, the ghost of fingertips on skin encouraging sensation and loss of self.

Thor does not know how long it lasts. Time seems irrelevant with his hand slipping down from Loki’s hair to rest again upon his clenching abdomen. Even as he realises he has no idea how long this state will last Loki murmurs something he can’t understand, the sound breathed into his mouth and swallowed whole, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Loki is Loki, no matter his true form – and Loki is here now in the king’s meadow, far from the palace and any who might care to pry into their private universe.

The sound of Sleipnir’s faint whinny does not strike him as important, not at first. Only when the horse begins to move to stand, five of the eight legs twitching and the head jutting up and out, do Loki and Thor untangle at least their physical selves from one another. Letting go with regret, Thor looks up to see what has disturbed Sleipnir so. His spine turns to sudden stone the same moment Loki stiffens like snake sensing the hunter’s tread through warm desert sand.

Sif stands not two feet from them, her eyes wide. A moment later, the practice sword she carries falls to the meadow grass without a sound. In such silence something _will_ rise – and Thor does not know what. But as his fingers dig into Loki’s side, he remembers again the feral freedom in Loki when he had been Sleipnir’s mother, racing through the Asgardian wildlands with no-one to restrain him.

And this time, Thor thinks he knows how to ride such a storm himself. And so he keeps his voice even, his words light, and his hand tight about Loki’s waist.

“Sif,” he says, “what brings you here?”

“I…I wanted some time to think before the Allfather’s þing. To swing a sword in the open air.” Her dignity she holds about her like a cloak; it makes sense it does not slip so easily, given how hard-won it has been in her own unconventional life. “I thought the high meadow would be the best place for it. The sun is so brilliant here, this close to the dawn.”

“It is.”

There are memories of Vanaheimr there, just below the roiling surface of her dark eyes. “Thor,” she says, and now she can be seen to struggle; it does not grow any easier for her when she follows the line of his arm, to where he sits so easily with his brother so close. Her throat works, and she bows her head to them both. “Excuse me. I will find another place, and leave you to yours.”

He only raises a hand in farewell; Loki’s hand remains upon his firstborn, fingers gentling the long muscles beneath equine skin. “You should go after her,” he observes quietly, and Thor cocks an eyebrow.

“Why?”

Loki always has more thoughts than the obvious upon any and all subjects, and Thor cannot guess the half of them now. In the end, he gives up the light and calculated: “She will take tell of this to the Allfather.”

“Do you really believe that?”

A complex look works across still features. And then, a sigh. “I suppose considering the circumstances she is more apt to speak to Heimdall first, and seek his counsel on how best to proceed.”

“And what does it matter if she does?” he replies, almost careless. “Surely Father knows of us now.”

“Yes, you made certain of it last night.”

For the first time Thor hears a genuine edge to Loki’s voice, and frowns. “Do you not wish people to know?”

“I suspect it is more complicated than mere knowledge,” he replies, quiet; one hand rests over his abdomen even as he shakes his head. “There is little choice in it now.”

If Loki’s assumptions are true – and Thor knows in his heart that they are – then his words are much the same. But he cannot bring himself to care. The webs of fate are spun about them all by the Norns, and will so easily tangle and choke and strangle those unwary and afraid, but he has never known anyone as skilful with his own webs as Loki Odinson. “We are due to speak with Father again regarding our next actions,” he says, almost soft. “We should go.”

“Yes. We should. It grows late.”

Despite his words Loki doesn’t actually move, instead again petting the horse. Thor tries valiantly to bring him back. “Late enough that we may have missed our opportunity for breakfast – I didn’t even think of finding a meal before I sought you out,” he says, and his stomach obligingly rumbles in secondment. Sleipnir’s eyes blink curiously as Loki’s eyes move down, and then up. His lips have moved into a sardonic slant, eyes flecked with the bright gold of the ever-brightening sun overhead.

“Oh, it must be love, if you are now missing meals on my behalf.”

“It’s always been love.” And he talks right over Loki’s flicker of surprise. “You are too thin, Loki. I cannot imagine you bothered with any sort of sustenance before you came wandering out here.”

_To be alone_ , he adds in his mind, and though he suspects Loki hears as much he merely says nothing of why he had sought such solitude with only his son for company. “I am fine,” he says, though Thor must frown.

“In such condition, it is not only your own wellbeing that concerns me.”

A strange flash moves through his eyes like a charged stormcloud skittering across the moon. Then it is gone and he is screwing up his nose, expression suspicious. “Oh,” he says, light and warning, “are you to become one of those dreadful boors who coddle and choke their pregnant brood mares, then? Or perhaps you will be a scolding mother hen pecking always at my heels.”

Thor does the only think he can think of: laughs with clear and easy disbelief. “Come, Loki, I’m the one who tried to ride you when you were last with child. Do you really think _I’d_ be that sensible?”

At first Loki appears to struggle with that. Then, a sly smile turns his irritation into something familiar and furtive. In that Thor finds both comfort and a curling of apprehensive glee about his heart as relief pounds like pandemonium through his veins. _This_ is his Loki: kaleidoscopic mischief, ever-changing chaos. The day stretches out before him and he does not know what it will bring. In many ways he doesn’t even care. Vanaheimr, and the gauntlet of trials they had run there both together and alone – neither has stolen his brother from him. They have instead given him something more, rich carbon pressed into brilliant diamond.

“Well,” Loki purrs in the manner of a tomcat parading high on the palace walls, “perhaps if you learn to ask _nicely_ , you might be allowed a ride this time around.”

“Just the one?”

“I suppose it depends on how well you perform.” Reaching forward, Loki curves his palm about his brother’s side, beginning from ribcage and moving down to hip before wrapping long fingers about the corded muscle of one thigh. Despite that ceaseless movement his eyes are motionless upon his, never once allowing even the dream of escape. “Your carriage, your seat…the way you move. There’s a trick to it, after all.” He squeezes tight, and Thor cannot hold in a gasp; Loki’s smile is rich and radiant cunning. “Shall I teach you that trick, perhaps? So that you might know how best to keep rhythm with trot and canter and full blown raging gallop?”

“Loki,” he says, half-strangled as the fingers flutter higher and a tongue traces across the fullness of a lower lip, “Loki, not in front of the children.”

Surprise freezes every movement, save for a sudden rapid blink. Then his hand moves back, though he cannot help but flutter his fingers just over the growing hardness between his brother’s legs. “Oh, Thor, you great idiot,” he murmurs, and pushes gently at Sleipnir’s protesting head. Only once he has regained his feet does he look back to Thor, still half-dazed beneath the tree. He holds out a hand, wry and amused. “Come, then. We have work to do.”

“Yes, we do,” he says, and takes it gratefully. Still, Loki lets go to fuss over Sleipnir a moment longer, quick hands working over the shining coat to remove loose grass and a few small burrs. Thor begins to cross the meadow, though he does not get far.

“I love you.”

The words are sudden, almost high-pitched. He swings back around, just quick enough to see the blank surprise on his brother’s face before it is schooled into something quieter, something slightly more defiant. But Thor can see where his knuckles have turned white, clenched tight about the bridle, and he smiles. No words of his own are required. Words are not what he was made for. Instead he steps close to his brother, places one hand upon the stubborn set of his jaw while fingertips move against the curling ends of his hair, and leans close. All he has to give is a kiss, though he will do it forevermore if only Loki would allow it.

One hand is light upon his chest as Loki presses him back. It is a soft movement, but one he does not intend to be denied. His smile is warm, but with a straight tint of sadness more suited to autumn than to the dawning of brilliant summer all around them. “We should go. There are things we cannot leave unsaid any longer than this.” He pauses, and his smile all but vanishes. “For what it might matter later I am glad you came here now, Thor.”

And for all their easiness of only moments ago, as they lead Sleipnir back to his royal stable Thor feels again that he is missing something. There are clouds beginning to gather on the horizon, though when he looks up now the sun remains brilliant pure gold and he cannot believe it beyond their divine doubled reach.

 

*****

 

Preliminary reports have been brought before the king, word of friend and foe. The gathering of the banners is begun and the great golden army of Asgard has been called to arms. Yet for all their vaunted might of legend and of reality, not one person can deny it has been a long time of peace. Asgard is a realm of warriors, but this is not a war they had expected to throw itself upon their doorstep.

Already it seems it goes deeper than they had initially feared. Rumours of enclaves across the entirety of Vanaheimr move about the room, accompanied by whispers of a rebellion already rooted deep in the once-quietened realm. The ordeal of their princes was truly only a beginning, perhaps only a feint.

_No_ , Thor thinks, eyes moving to his brother’s straight-backed form in his seat amongst the high lords and their councils. _No, it was no feint. They wanted Loki. They needed his seiðr. They called him a prophecy…but they did not realise Loki makes his own luck._

And when Loki glances over then, just for a moment, he all but hears his brother’s words whispered directly into his own mind.

_Lies and luck are not so different, brother mine._

Something about that unsettles him, but it is not at all unusual for Loki to say something Thor is not meant to understand, at least not immediately. Instead he concentrates upon the debates unfolding before them upon the war-council’s great round table. Listening without speaking, he notices Loki does much the same – and others notice it too for it is odd behaviour for them both, though in different manners. At such councils Thor usually has words of goading glory, encouraging all to action and motion. Loki is more careful, planning tactics while dissecting those of their enemies. This morning both princes are watchful and silent, much in the way of their father’s eye whenever it passes over them both.

So it is so much more a surprise when it happens. The warlords speak of a sortie into the westlands of Vanaheimr, quite far from the ruined city of their captivity. One commander says he will lead, and Loki does more than nod his agreement.

“I will come with you.”

“ _No_.”

It could almost have been amusing, the way all the faces that had first locked upon Loki now swivel towards Thor. But he has eyes for no-one but his brother, his hands already clenching upon the table. Mjölnir hums a warning at his side, though to whom it directs itself he does not know.

“No, Loki, you cannot,” he repeats, and Loki’s eyes go curiously wide even as he leans languidly back in his horn-crested chair.

“I _cannot_ ,” he repeats, and it is with the easy amusement that promises blood and laughter to follow. “No, you have this thought wrong, I believe. I will do what I wish, and you _cannot_ command me otherwise, brother.”

“I can. I _will_. I am your elder and I—”

“Why would you deny me this?” The long fingers roll open the carved wood of the ancient table, a warning rumble of approaching storm. “I know my limits, Thor, and I know my strengths.” Then he leans forward, hissing his fury across the table. “ _How dare you think to deny me my vengeance_.”

Shock settles upon them all, leaving the entire council in silence. It strikes Thor hard then, the knowledge that not even he himself truly knows the depths of which Loki speaks. All that has been said is that the brothers were taken to be used as pawns in this game between thrones, and that they had wreaked their havoc in order to return home to gather force enough to do more of the same. Anything more they will speak of to Odin alone.

Still the truth of his reticence burns upon his tongue now. _You cannot go, not in your condition_. Thor cannot say so aloud, and not just because he knows that if he does Loki will launch himself at him. It might seem a distant possibility to another, but sometimes he thinks people would be more respectful of Loki’s abilities had they ever truly seen him lose his temper.

Their father knows that truth at least. And they are now held both in Odin’s watchful eye, singularity of wisdom at the heart of grasping black hole of everything and nothing. Thor keeps his silence while Loki seethes, and the warlords and nobles of Asgard cannot help but stare at their prodigal princes.

It is their king who deigns speak at last. “I believe we shall leave matters as they stand for the time being, and convene again in two turns of the horologia.” He turns, his spine straight and his head held high despite the fact Thor knows the Odinsleep has been looming on the horizon for some weeks now. “Now that the essentials of our campaign are in order, there are matters I must discuss with my sons alone.”

Maps, dispatches, even weapons are collected from the table as warriors and councillors alike bow and nod and take their leave. Only when the great doors close, the guards left without, does Thor incline his head in respectful query.

“Father, I would say one thing before we go down this path.”

When he looks up again, the stern face known from childhood on seems no different now than it ever has. He takes comfort in that. “Yes, my son?”

“I feel no shame for what I have done, nor why I have done it – and most certainly not for whom I did it with.”

The long look is measured, searching. “I see,” Odin murmurs, and turns his head towards his secondborn. “Loki, would you care to add something to your brother’s words before we resume elsewhere?”

The silver tongue is held still for so long Thor thinks there is nothing more Loki might care to say. When he does speak, it is clear and brittle as fresh-frozen ice. “Anything that I have done to return to this place and these people, I would do again.”

“And so it has been said,” Odin intones, in low thought. There’s a flare of answering _something_ in Loki’s eyes, a slight stiffening to his shoulders that Thor does not understand. Whatever has just moved between his father and his brother has passed him completely by, and already Odin shakes his head. “I knew this day would come. You always were destined to be at one another’s side.”

Thor can hear a kind of sadness in that – and he cannot but help recall the Vanir seiðmaðr, hearing again his mad words of prophecy and promise. The taste it leaves in his mouth is like water drawn from a deep and bitter well. “And so we are,” he says, curving unconsciously closer to Loki’s still and silent form.

“And so it goes.” When he stands Odin seems weary. “Come, my sons. This is not something to be done here. There is something I would have understood in a place better suited to such matters.”

As they leave the conference chambers behind the throne room, Thor knows the direction they take: it will lead them to the vault beneath. While he thinks there must be something odd in that, it’s not entirely surprising. There are things there that one must consider in such troubled times: secrets and lies, and the weapons with which to fight them. Mjölnir hums absently against his thigh; it had resided long within its cradling walls before he had proved himself worthy of its power. Perhaps there is something for Loki there, too.

_After you confess all of the weapon you have already wrought between you, perhaps_.

That thought sends an uncomfortable shiver down his spine as he keeps pace with his brother. It’s not a fear of confrontation; Thor Odinson has never backed down from a fight. It is not even shame. He regrets nothing of what has brought them to this pass. It is more to do with Loki himself and the strange state he has slid into while Thor has not been watching. Quiet again, there is an odd slant both to Loki’s eyes and to his locomotion. In many ways he walks like a condemned prisoner mounting the steps of his scaffold.

Once inside the vault they move together down the staircase. Odin is ahead, his sons behind and beside; Thor wants to reach out, to grasp Loki’s hand as they would have done as children. Somehow he cannot as they move closer to the far end: the most secure place directly in front of the Destroyer’s seiðr-worked bonds, keyed to Gungnir and the will of the King of Asgard.

Odin stops before he reaches it, turns back. Thor’s heart skips a beat when he sees a single hand laid upon the Casket of Ancient Winters. It is nothing compared to the way it seizes completely when Loki’s silence cracks wide open.

 “No,” he breathes, eyes wide and half-blinded with rising panic, “no no no no _no_.”

Though he speaks scarcely above a whisper it beats against Thor’s ears like a half a dozen blows. Yet the pain of that is nothing compared to the shock when he feels Loki’s legs give out beneath him.

“Loki?” His brother has gone to his knees, his head bowed, hands clenched upon the smooth marble floor of the vault. It is a shadow of memory cast over them both, the nightmare of Vanaheimr reborn in the deepest safety of Asgard – except there, even when held prisoner, Loki had never once broken.

Now Thor feels like the pieces of his brother are falling through his hands as he looks up from his silence, brow creased and fingers digging tight into black Asgardian leather. Knelt at his side, hands upon shoulder and waist, he looks up to Odin Allfather, motionless as a statue before his sons.

 “Father, what has an ancient relic of Jötunheimr have to do with this fresh vendetta of Vanaheimr? Why did you bring us here now?”

The demand is met not with spoken answer, but something far closer to the pulse of a half-seen heart. Blue winter roils within the Casket beneath Odin’s open palm, and it is as cold as the fear in Loki’s trembling body.

At first Odin is silent even in the face of Loki’s desperate questioning gaze. Then he moves to speak and Thor feels the world begin to crack at the seams. Another reality is birthing itself before his very eyes – the winds are shaking the leaves upon Yggdrasil’s highest branches while the deepest roots move uneasily in ground long unturned, and for a moment he thinks he can taste cold clear water.

He is drowning in the Well of Urðr, but he is more frightened by the thought that Loki might have already been cast headfirst into its depths long ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Was that too fluffy? Maybe it was too fluffy.
> 
> DON'T WORRY.
> 
> WE'RE CHANGING TACKS AND IN THESE WATERS, HERE BE ANGST AND DRAMA.
> 
> OH THE **ANGST AND DRAMA THERE BE** , MATEYS.


	2. I Will Show You Fear In A Handful Of Dust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Loki and Thor learn of both Loki's true parentage and Odin's true reason for concealing it, and much about their time in Vanaheimr becomes clear.
> 
> Loki does not take to it well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel I should apologise for how long this took to write, but frankly I'm scratching my head anyway because the .doc this lives in is now well over 19k in length _and I still have no idea what the plot of this damn story is_. To that end, I have no idea when we'll next see a bit more to it, or even if anyone wants anymore considering it just seems to be me flailing my hands at the keyboard until something like prose emerges.
> 
> So, uh. Yeah. I'm so, so sorry.

“Loki,” says the Allfather, low and with all the authority of his long and divine existence, “Odinson, given the turn of recent days there is something I would now have you know.”

And Loki looks away, looks _down_ ; still on his hands and knees, his back arches with a rending sob. Tense hands claw in stark mimicry those of a beast as he grapples for support from the smooth marble, breath harsh and hitching and yet the harder he tries the more he can’t quite catch it. Thor holds tight to him still, but in a sudden animalistic shudder of his entire body Loki shakes his hands loose. Rearing back upon his heels he stares up at their father with green eyes wrought of wildfire, his usually immaculate hair the darkmatter of an expanding singularity about his too-pale face.

“What would have me know?” he says, and even though his voice is a low hoarse sibilant hiss, still each word is as clear as the agony that now holds him motionless and resolute. “What is it? _Father_?”

Thor flinches. Their father does not. And he dimly thinks that that is the reason why Odin is king and he mere childing prince when the Allfather nods, hand motionless upon the Casket.

“You are the child of my heart, though you were not born of the blood that flows through it.” His single eye is both merciful and pitiless as he goes on, the relentless words little else but more of the same. “In this Casket dwells your true heritage, though it need not be your inheritance.”

Beneath the weight of their father’s pronouncement Thor feels very cold, as if he has been thrust into the coldest true night of Jötunheimr – but he has never been to Jötunheimr. Few have, since the days of the war’s end. It is forbidden, part of the terms of the peace forced upon a broken people by the victorious Allfather. The irony had always been that they were not the ones who would struggle to keep that promise, given the presence of the Casket within Asgard. They had no choice. And his blood is like ice in his veins as Thor stares at his father and the confiscated heart of a realm he once would have sworn neither he nor his brother had ever visited.

_What other choices have been taken from Loki? From me? From all of us?_

“That’s not possible.” Now he is speaking and he scarcely realises it. “That is _impossible_.”

Though Loki holds his silence, keeps his own counsel, he looks then to his brother. They are both on their knees before their king, before their father – and yet his brother stares at him as if he sees a stranger. At first his face is a blank mask, neither painted nor curved into expression by its artisan. Then, a shocking single second collapses it into an ugly grimace of misery and anger.

“What at you looking at?”

He rears back. “You are my brother,” he says, and he sounds like a child. “You are not a monster.”

Loki’s blow comes out of nowhere. Though Loki is strong, he has never been in Thor’s league; it is instead the element of surprise that brings Thor low, head spinning as he crashes into the floor. But then that had always been Loki’s way, Loki’s skill: to take by stealth rather than strength, to move in shadow rather than the shining gleam of pure sunlight.

Taken by that surprise Thor gasps, rolls back; his head rings as his brother leaps to his feet, and thinks in bleak blank shock: _of course he knows the secret ways to fight his battles and take his victories; he is himself a relic of another world, stolen in shade and silence._

Then Loki is screaming. _Screaming_. There is no other word for what pours from his lips because there are no words. It is just an incoherent throbbing shriek of rage and hurt and _fury_ , exploding forth from his brother’s throat like hideous terrible creature born from his body—

The world tilts about him, his stomach twisting in impossible knots. But Thor pushes up, fights against all else as he grabs for his brother’s hand. The fingers are cold in his, ice-riddled and tight, but he forces his own between them and holds on for dear life.

“Loki,” he says, hoarse and hurting, “Loki, _stop_.”

And he does. But he does not look down. He looks nowhere but to the Allfather, his face bone-pale and his green eyes fever-bright and furious.

“Why?” This is not a scream, but a ruthless expulsion of air and emotion and deep dark need. “Why did you make me in this false image?” Wrenching his hand free of Thor’s, his voice catches upon itself, tumbling headlong over something that cannot be called a laugh. “Because it _is_ false, isn’t it? This isn’t who I am. This isn’t even _what_ I am.”

Now he strides forward, head held high as he climbs to the level of his king and takes the twinned handles of the Casket between both hands. Thor lurches forward as he gains his own feet, only to stop a moment; the Allfather has raised a hand to him, halting him where he stands. But his single eye remains upon his youngest son.

And Loki is changing. Thor is behind him and so cannot see his face – but Loki _bows_ beneath the weight of the Casket he has raised between his palms. A low keen whistles out from betwixt his lips, as if they have been sewn shut and he cannot release all the words within for the burn of the binding thread that holds them forever closed.

“Loki,” the Allfather says, steady as the stone of all ages, as the rooted trunk of Yggdrasil itself, “Loki, you can put it down now.”

“I can’t.” The bitter laugh is like ground glass pushed ever deeper into a weeping wound. “Because it’s _inside_ me, isn’t it? I can’t cast aside what I am.”

Thor is silent; as if feeling his brother’s desperate gaze Loki turns to face him with his hands filled yet with his discovery. The Casket itself catches Thor’s eye first, the patterned ensorcelled stone wrought with swirled dark lines as the white pulses within, a storm bound and bleeding within its bonds. He should feel kinship with that, perhaps; Thor is himself a rider upon such storms, but this is not one he has called down with either Mjölnir or his own bright shining divinity. He is thunder and lightning and harsh pounding rain; this is the snow and ice of a realm far beyond the borders and rule of Asgard, for all it had once bent the knee to both.

And now he looks up to the centre of that storm, and his breath catches as if it had stripped the air clear of all oxygen, burning it all away.

“I am not your brother,” Loki says, cold and harsh as an imagined Jötunn winter. Thor has seen few frost giants in his life; they are permitted into Asgard only rarely, and always under guard, and always for the shortest possible time necessary for them to conduct what little business is essential between their realms. But he knows what they are. And he has known his brother his entire life.

There is something so deep and peculiar about seeing both in this way: the shadow of his brother subsumed by the mask of the Jötunn. The fine bones of his face remain, and his body is the slim whipcord of before; neither have become anything like the harsh blocky features and heavily muscled bodies of Jötunn warriors he has seen before. Loki’s dark hair, long and shining, the dual crest of his fine eyebrows, also remain where the Jötunn warriors Thor has seen before have all been hairless.

And so it is his skin that strikes him first: a rich and vivid blue that cannot be named cyanotic, for he is so _alive_. The symmetrical patterns of birth and breeding move across his skin in raised swirls; Thor does not know what they are, of what house or province they speak of, if even the Allfather himself knows. But they are strong and stark across brow and cheek, trailing down the slim throat to disappear beneath the collar of his Asgardian garb.

It is the eyes that hold him still, shock him deepest – for Loki’s green eyes, so rare amongst Asgardians, are no more. The dark pupils are surrounded instead by an iris-blaze of _red_ , lightening across the sclera until their very edges they are palest rose.

The more he looks, the more it seems as though somehow Loki _bleeds_ from those eyes, and Thor cannot contain a choke. It rouses Loki and for the first time since he turned, he blinks. Still his eyes are the crimson of a creature they had both been raised to know as defeated foes, toothless monsters, something to be held forever at scornful distance for there is no need to fear what has already been so long broken.

“I am not your brother,” he repeats, scarce whisper as his fingers tighten over the Casket. “I never was.”

“You will always be my brother.”

When he laughs, it is the breaking of the ice across a deep frozen lake neither of them had even known was there. “Then you are a fool.”

“Loki.” Odin’s voice rings through the vaulted hall like a call to arms. “Put the Casket down.”

When he looks at his father it is like he is a stranger. And indeed, to Thor, Loki looks with the eyes of a stranger. Still he turns. A moment later there comes the click of it being settled back into its place. With his head bowed he looks at neither brother nor father. Then he turns, straightens, descends the stairs in a manner that is somehow dignified for all there is the skittering sense of a spider abandoning its broken web – and then he walks straight past Thor with nary a word and his head held high. His skin is again pale spilled milk, his eyes bright poisoned green, and his face is streaked with tears.

“Loki.” As he moves almost beyond reach Thor’s hand darts out, catches his arm without thought. “Loki, where are you _going_?”

When Loki stares at Thor, he stares right through him. There is no comprehension there, no sign that his quick and clever mind works through the minefield of this revelation. And Thor is aghast – and not just for the complete shutdown of his brother’s mind. No-one walks from the king’s presence without the king’s leave.

“The weapons vault is no place for enemy spawn,” he says, sudden and swift, as if he has plucked thoughts like weeds from his brother’s overgrown mind. “Unless…you would rather I stayed here?” His arm spasms in Thor’s grip even as he swivels his face back to the Allfather, the fine-boned features warped in furious realisation. “Because that’s what I am, aren’t I? A weapon. A tool. Something that might once have been of use, had I not been broken already.”

“Loki, what are you talking about?” And Thor is afraid. He has never felt fear like this, not as his brother turns back upon him with his mouth cracked open in a great gaping smile and his eyes like serpentine venom dripping from revealed fangs. His hand twitches, but Mjölnir is far – and this is not a battle she could win, even should he call her to arms.

“Oh, Thor, don’t you _see_?” Loki gives him a bitter laugh, high and fractured, like cracking ice falling into the heaving sea beneath. “Open your eyes and see! This is why all of this idiocy first came to pass – this is exactly why the Vanir wanted me in the first place!”

He stares with no real idea of what to do, fingers twitching. He should have brought Mjölnir, he thinks dumbly. She has not often left his hand since Vanaheimr – but he thought there would be no need of her here, not in the safest most secret place of all Asgard.

“Because you were born of Jötunheimr?” he asks finally, half-hoarse in confusion and the dull creep of unwanted revelation. “It does not matter where you were born, you are Aesir!”

“And they are the _Vanir_ , you fool,” he sneers, even as something far more like a sob slides beneath it. “Prophecy is their gift. They know what matters most in the greater circles of fate that will sooner or later crush us all in their tightening coils.”

“I do not…”

But Loki has already turned his attention from his brother, staring back again at the Allfather.

“Is that why you took me? So I would not be the one to destroy you?” His shaking hands rise, cradle his abdomen, and he is laughing again, his eyes bright and furious and deep dark misery even as they wander away from the here and the now. “It’s too late. It’s already done, and I will not undo it. Not on your word, not on anyone else’s. There is nothing you can do to take this from me.”

“Loki,” Thor says, bewildered now even as his fear grows ever stronger, “Loki, what are you talking about?”

“They wanted a child of my blood.” Again his hands tighten, tight against the fitted engraved leather of his light armour as his eyes shift in the recall of memory. “This is what they told me. I did not know exactly why, given we had both been taken – I thought perhaps it was the seiðr in my soul, or the fact that I gave myself willingly. These things work better with the illusion of freedom, you see – the strength of such spells comes in the giving of that which cannot be taken.” Taking a shuddering, chuckling breath, his whole body shudders with the revulsion of recalled touch and violation. “Not that it worked – because in my heart I didn’t want to give myself, not to them.”

Abruptly Thor wishes he had Mjölnir to hand after all. Though he has smashed her singing star-death head into those damned bodies and broken them all the pieces he wishes nothing more in this moment than to wing his way across the skies between realms and strike and hammer and destroy what remains still until there is nothing but dust and ash left to those who had dared lay hands upon his brother.

“But you did give yourself,” he says instead, voice hollow with growing understanding. “You gave yourself to me. That was how we escaped…that was where the power came from.”

“In some respects, yes.” There’s a pity in his voice that Thor does not quite understand, even as Loki tilts him a mocking smile. “And in retrospect it’s a surprise they didn’t attempt it sooner than they did, knowing that I only co-operated in order to spare you all any of the attentions I could reserve instead for myself, considering I was the sole reason we were all taken.” Then he pauses, and his eyes move to the Allfather with the striking speed of a roused serpent. “But then perhaps there was a prophecy even they did not know of.”

At first, there is only silence; Loki’s words ring about the hall with dark echoing purpose. Then, their father and their king nods with the heaviness of recognised culpability.

“They wanted a child of your bloodline, yes,” Odin says, and though he speaks without shame his voice is low and heavy. “The royal line of Jötunheimr.”

In the resultant stillness it is clear even Loki had not expected as much.

“ _Royal_?”

For the first time since he had begun all this Odin begins to sag beneath the weight of a delayed Odinsleep, and the accusing and bewildered gazes of both his sons. “I found you in the palace temple, after the fall of Laufey’s last guards,” he says, and then he gives a sharp jerk of his head, as though angry at his own quibbling. “Although perhaps I should not say that I found you. I was _guided_ to you.”

And now one hand, knotted by age but still strong and steady enough to wield a sword, to raise Gungnir to the heavens, moves upward in slow and thoughtful movement. Fingertips press to the cheekbone just beneath his lost eye as he never once looks away from Loki.

“I _saw_ you.”

Loki shudders beneath that sight now. “Laufey took your eye in the last battle between your forces upon the frozen wastes of Jötunheimr. I’ve heard you say it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times.”

“Not so,” he says, voice a low wearied rumble. “I gave it.” His remaining eye goes to the Casket, his smile holding nothing in it of amusement or pleasure even as it widens. “Do you truly believe it would allow itself to be taken from its proper place, without proper payment tendered?”

“You gave your eye for the Casket?”

“It wanted me to See,” Odin says, even and relentless. “And I did.”

“And you saw me.”

“I saw one possible future,” he corrects with the immediacy of a king who expects to be obeyed. Loki is silent, but still he seethes; his frustration crackles beneath his skin and behind his eyes like storm, and Thor cannot look away. They are green, those eyes, but they had not so long ago been crimson – as crimson as blood spilled across battlefields he has only known in legend and in song.

But Thor has never been one to care for prophecy or myth, unless it led him to adventure or glory. Swallowing now, he chokes on a dry throat and can only croak his words like a stepped-upon toad. “Loki is of the royal line of Jötunheimr?”

It is a pitying look Loki gives him. It freezes upon his face with Odin’s words. “Loki is Laufey’s son.”

And Loki turns again at the bottom of the stair, paler still, as again it is painfully clear he had not expected as much. “ _What_?”

“The Casket sang of you both, to me.” He closes his single eye, takes a deep breath to fill his barrel chest. “It took my eye, and in that for a single blazing moment I Saw all that it knew of you both.”

“But why?” Again, Thor feels himself blinded, stumbled in the dark tangle of Yggdrasil’s deepest roots. “Heimdall is your sight across all realms, and you yourself upon Hliðskjálf might see—”

“This is not seeing what is, or what was. It is what will be.” Odin’s pronouncement is a sharp blade, yet heavy as it falls; the two-handed swing of a broadsword fallen upon the exposed neck of one awaiting final judgement. “And when I took the Casket, it warned me of how vengeance would be wrought – by the joint blood of Jötunheimr and Asgard.”

Again Loki holds his hands upon his flat abdomen. Fury colours his voice in bright carrying crimson, but the tears in his eyes hold only the reflection of deepest green. “You should have killed me when you had the chance,” he whispers, and his hands spasm. Odin shakes his head, regret in every slow stroke.

“You were but an infant, Loki,” he murmurs, weary. “And the Casket showed me only what might be, not what was. In the arrogance of my youth and flushed with my victory, I thought I might turn back the flow of fate upon itself.”

Loki’s face is bone pale. “What are you saying?”

“I thought if there were feelings of brotherhood between you, it would stop this.” His eyes move down, and though he is without Gungnir his hand moves, as if to support himself with its strong line. “I was wrong.”

“You were not wrong!” Like a child Thor stamps his foot upon the floor, and even as this distance he feels Mjölnir tremble in return. “I will never accept my love for Loki as being _wrong_!”

“You say it was a kindness to let me live – live amongst you, in your golden realm.” That is Loki himself, all calm hostility where his golden brother is blazing wrath. “Tell me, Allfather – how was _that_ a kindness? Forcing me to grow up amongst those who always thought me less, a seiðmaðr, no true warrior. Always less to the golden son – your true son.”

His eye moves back and forth between them, and his own rage is a terrible swing of serenity that cuts deep into them both. “You should be glad I let you love one another,” he says. “I could have made it hate.”

And Thor is too aghast to be angry. “You could never have made me hate Loki.”

“It would have been easy enough.” And he almost seems remorseful, even as he is relentless. “Because of the differences not even his perpetual glamour could ever hope to mask, Loki has danced the fine edge of hating you his entire life.”

The berserker blood bred deep into his veins his flesh his very Aesir _soul_ screams at that moment, rages against the chains of honour and control that keep it quiescent until summoned by great need – or great desire. And his heart sings for Mjölnir, demands she come to his hand. With great difficulty Thor denies both, stands before his king in silence, eyes a silver-thronged blue storm.

Even in the face of such withheld fury, Odin is only wearied further. “Thor, no matter his parentage, Loki is your brother – both now, and then, and forever.”

“You did not take me for your son because of anything as childish or as noble as love, Allfather.”

He turns on Loki then, eye flashing sudden fury. “I took you to give you life,” he says, and his voice rises to a shout that shakes the entire chamber down its floating foundations. “Is that not what any father – or _mother_ – would do for their child?”

Loki rears back, silenced, eyes wide – and Odin himself subsides, letting out a long breath.

“I could have told you the truth years ago. I chose not to do so.” The great hands tighten. “That burden is mine to bear. But I doing so I have given you a terrible choice now, I know.”

A crawling sensation begins to work underneath Thor’s skin, a writhing serpent of fear and fury, but it is his brother who speaks first. “No,” Loki says, automatic. “ _No_.”

“You must not bear your brother’s child.”

“Father!” Thor shouts, and Odin turns back to him.

“He is your brother.” There is clear disbelief writ upon his lined features now, mingled deep in those fissures with clear disappointment. “Did you ever believe, even before now, that Asgard would accept the child of your own brother’s body as your first-born heir?”

“I…” His fists tighten, and his mind floods with a sudden avalanche of sight and sound and sensation and his bites his lip so hard all he tastes is iron. “…you were not there in Vanaheimr. You cannot understand how it was. How it _felt_.” Again, he wishes he had Mjölnir to hand – if only because she had been there. If only because she had _known_. “It was meant to be.”

“Indeed, the Norns weave the threads of our fate as they will.” For the first time there is clear plea in his words, for all they are still the command of a king. “But this is a thread you can cut free.”

“I…”

“For all his perceived faults, there are few who have ever doubted Loki’s devotion to you.” Again, though he commands, there is a persuasive tilt to the Allfather’s words that almost makes them seem as though they might be Thor’s own desire. “They will accept him as your advisor. They will not accept him as your consort. He is your brother. That is the only capacity in which he might stand by you.”

“But…” A flash of inspiration, so temporarily brilliant, blindsides him; still, he already knows it is wrong before he even speaks it aloud. “…if it were known he had been born of another father…”

“Perhaps. As a Jötunn prince, he would be of high enough blood to be your consort, to bear your heirs. He cannot be your brother if he is to do these things.” There is a strange kind of defeat behind every word, however, as if it pains him greatly to have to point out something that ought to have been obvious to the heir of the throne of Asgard. “But if it is known that he is the offspring of Laufey, bastard or not his people will insist upon his return to Jötunheimr.” “And what, then, do you think would happen to your not-brother?”

“I would not allow Loki to be taken to Jötunheimr!”

“Then you risk war.” And as a veteran of many, Odin stands tall beside the spoils of one and shakes his white head. “And we are already at war on one side; would you welcome it on another?”

“Do I not have any choice in this?” Loki’s bitter, bloodied words are high-pitched, almost hysterical. “You speak of me as if I am nothing but spoils of war, or a tool, a weapon to be locked up with all the other treasures you have taken from realms beyond this one!”

“You have a choice, Loki.” He watches his second-born not-born with still serenity of purpose. “And you see further into this than your brother ever will – and for that, I trust you to make the correct one.”

“How can you trust me, when I cannot see how you could ever expect me to trust you again?”

Even as Loki shouts, Thor’s voice grows weak with the horror of realisation. “Father,” he says, “you cannot mean to take…a _child_ … _our_ child…you yourself only just said that you brought Loki here because you would not… _could_ not…”

“I have seen the future, my son.” One hand rises, a finger levelled at the very root of Loki’s abdomen. “And your son, at its centre, is also its ending.”

Beneath those pitiless words Thor knows his back could bend until it breaks. Instead he straightens, stands tall, his brother ever at his side. “Loki and I would never allow it.” His voice rings with the star-iron silvered song of Mjölnir herself, his jaw set and his eyes blazing with sudden lightning strike. “We could change that future.”

“As I tried?”

He had not even needed to raise his voice. The long-held despair of the Allfather is imbued in every word, its truth inescapable.

“Fate is like a river,” he says at last, quiet, “correcting its course against any change. And the water is always drawn from the same well, no matter whether the vessel is battered tin or bright shining gold.” Then, he bows his head, palm pressed to the roiling cold of the Casket of Ancient Winter. “It all tastes the same, upon the lips of kings and peasants alike.”

Thor turns from his father, half blinded. He will go to his brother. He cannot see how he can be expected to do anything else.

But Loki is gone.

 

*****

 

When Loki does not wish to be found, he will remain hidden even to Heimdall’s eyes. But that is not the reason why Thor chooses not go to Heimdall. This is simply not for the Gatekeeper to see, though Thor knows he will all the same. That does nothing to alter the fact that this is his duty.

Yet as he begins to walk the corridors of the palace, mind turning over all possibilities as to where he might find his brother, it is their mother who stops him dead with a simple call.

“Thor?”

“Mother.” He halts, momentarily confused; they stand together in one of the great arcades about the western gardens, and his mother is strangely alone, no hand or shieldmaidens in loose formation about her royal figure. He frowns, pushes a hand back through his hair even as he asks a question he fears he already knows the answer to. “Have you seen Loki?”

“No.” Her lovely face is grave ivory beauty as she looks into his eyes. “Your father told you of where he was born.”

It is a soft statement of fact, and Thor sees no reason to shy from the truth. “He hasn’t taken to it well.”

“I wished we could have spoken to him of it from the beginning,” she replies, and her sorrow is like a mantle across her slim shoulders. Yet she holds her head high, the reigning queen bearing her duty as if it were merely another layer of the skin she had been born in. “But I understand why your father chose not to do so.”

Thor traces a lip with a dry tongue. He still does not understand what it truly means, what Loki had come to know in Vanaheimr that has brought them all to this pass. “Because…because of the prophecy?”

“Yes.”

All his life, the one person he has never been afraid of is his mother – for no matter what he had done, no matter the trouble he had wrought whether by his own hands or by the whispered encouragement of Loki’s words, he has always felt he could lay anything that troubled him before her small slippered feet. But in this, for the first time, he feels shame.

“You know what we have done.”

He wants to look down, he wants to look away. But her eyes do not allow it, wide and soft and yet unyielding; her love is a spider web, fine-spun and cradling and so very very strong as she catches him within it. With gentle grace she lays one hand upon his cheek. She is smaller than he, more delicate in bone and muscle, and must raise herself upon her toes to do so. Yet he feels but a child again, and suddenly wishes nothing more than to be in her arms.

“You have done as your heart guided you,” she murmurs, her voice the remembered cadence of every cradle-song he has ever known, “and I have always accepted that it would guide you to him, one day.”

“You…are not angry?”

“I cannot be angry with that which was inevitable.” As her fingers stroke a soft path just above the edge of bearded skin, her smile widens with all the elegance of a woman who been born a mother, born a queen. “He is yours, Thor, as you are his.”

“But…”

“Go to him.” One hand moves down, the other up, until both rest upon his shoulders as her eyes search his with telling command. “Tell him what you feel, and do not try to best him with embellishment or exaggeration. Loki tangles himself in words so often that sometimes only the simplest actions may prove him otherwise.” There is a sadness in her now as she pushes him gently back. “I would go to him, if I thought he might listen. But now…in this moment, I know that you are all he sees.”

“Mother.”

“My son.” Again she comes close, moving upward as he leans down, accepting the soft press of her lips against his brow. One last time she cradles his cheek as she hand when he had been but a child, and in her eyes shines the clear brilliant sky of Asgard that her children had grown up beneath. “I will always love you both. You are the sons of my heart, and I would have you rest there together for as long as you both shall live.”

Nodding, half-blinded by tears he cannot shed, he turns from their mother and knows the path he must take. Before she had spoken to him, he had not been sure where to begin; there are so many places his brother could go, countless nooks and crannies and shadowed corners in which to lose himself, and that in the palace alone. But Loki is not in the palace, and Thor knows where to find him.

With quick and knowing steps Thor goes again to the high meadow. The sun has passed its highest point, beginning its downward trajectory towards the glittering star-studded horizon. As he climbs the path he’d last taken only that morning he recognises a vague sense of hunger; between the early rising and the Allfather’s thing, he has still not eaten one proper meal at all. But it is a different desire that drives him on, drives him further.

Loki is a shadow at the far end of the meadow, standing before the same tree where they had rested together with Sleipnir but mere hours before. But he does not lean his back against it, for strength or for support. Instead he stands distant, his gloved hands as steady as his aim as he embeds knife after knife into its aching bark, sap bleeding like honeyed tears to curl and curve down the ridges of growth and time.

Even as he approaches with no caution nor care Loki does not acknowledge him. Thor knows he does not have to. He simply goes to his side and there he stops to wait.

“I do not desire your company, brother.”

“But I desire yours.” His mother’s words dance as a warning in his mind, and an encouragement. He swallows hard, speaks as simply as his heart dictates. “I’ve always desired you.”

“And now we know why.” One last thrust, and the knife remaining to him goes deepest into the very heart of the trunk. Then Loki turns; colour burning high in his cheeks, his eyes bright with fury. “You don’t want me because of who I am. It’s only ever been _what_ I am that draws you to me.”

“Loki.” He says the word almost as a surprise, and Loki himself looks taken aback; he uses the moment of surprise to press harder. “You are _Loki_ , and you are my brother. Is there a difference? Because if there is, I don’t understand it.”

“What don’t you understand?” And his slim shoulders slump, begin to shake; it’s laughter and misery and exasperation all tangled up together and when he looks up his eyes are bright with the tears that he can’t let himself shed. “Oh, brother, don’t you _realise_? They took me in Vanaheimr because to their eyes, I was the subject of a prophecy, yes? Weren’t you listening to the Allfather?”

“I didn’t understand what the prophecy was,” he says, with a surprising amount of dignity; but then he is used to his brother leaving him far behind in matters of mind and academics. And Loki sighs.

“The prophecy the Vanir told me of says that a child of my blood will be the fall of the house of Odin.” He has to look away then, his bright eyes troubled and troubling as they look across the meadow to the glittering city far below. “And by extension, all of Asgard itself.”

“But…you have borne children. And…”

“And Father has rarely been kind to them,” he says, raising a bitter eyebrow as he looks back to his brother. “But that was just…for security, shall we say? Because he knew that it made no difference, allowing them to be free or to be shackled, either in service to his own throne or quite literally in the darkest bowels of the World Tree.” He takes a deep breath, stares now at his hands. “They lack one necessary element to fulfil the prophecy.”

And Thor cannot speak.

“But thanks to Father behaving as he did towards my children, he only obscured that truth all the more.” When he laughs, it is as sharp and bitter and well-wrought as the blade of any one of his own throwing knives. “It was likely his intent, for he would not wish his golden son brought into such…vile matters.”

“I am involved now.”

“You always were.” His frustration burns bright now, and he begins to pace, boots crushing grass and wildflower beneath his heels as his hands clench and release. “Thor, by shaming and shielding and hiding my children as he did, he made the Vanir believe that I was the sole progenitor required for the blooded creature who could be his downfall! That is not true. The truth of that is what he gave his eye for – the wisdom of foresight as to the fall of everything.”

“Ragnarök,” he whispers, and at last Loki is still again.

“Yes.” One long fingered hand rises, scrubs tiredly across his eyes. “It is not a child of Jötunheimr raised in Asgard that is the subject of that prophecy, as the Vanir gleaned.” This time he struggles so much that he trips over the words, unable to meet his brother’s eyes as he whispers: “It is a child born of two realms. Aesir and Jötunn.” Now his eyes are tortured fury, his entire body trembling with the horror of it. “The son of princes. The son of kings.”

“…our son.”

The hand over his belly in strong and protective, but it seems pitifully insufficient to ward against all that will arm itself against its very existence. “Our son,” Loki whispers in repeated horror, and Thor feels quite sick.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, sudden. “It is just a prophecy, it doesn’t mean—”

“Of course it matters,” he interrupts, slashing his other hand to cut Thor’s words dead. “The Allfather thought to circumvent the prophecy by keeping me where he could see me – by making of us blood brothers, warriors to stand at one another’s side.” Again he stares at his hands, which have always cleaved towards sorcery rather than the sword. “It clearly didn’t work.”

“I do not regret what we did.” Though he has no idea how to convince Loki of as much; it had seemed so much easier in Vanaheimr, when the choice had been forced upon them until both realised it had never been a choice at all. Thinking suddenly of his mother’s warning, he takes her words, offers them blindly to his brother. “It was inevitable.”

“Yes, and that’s the problem, isn’t it?”

His brother’s bitterness burns and he knows not how to extinguish such a flame. “In what way?”

“You only want me because fate pushes me towards you.” Everything about his body resonates with a hundred years and more of concealed frustration, and for the first time Thor feels the truth of his father’s terrible words:

_Loki has danced the fine edge of hating you his entire life._

“You can tell yourself it’s love, or lust, or just a longing for something that you’d thought you’d once lost, but it doesn’t matter,” he says, thin ice just waiting to crack and swallow them both whole. “I’m just something that was made to be yours, even though it could only ever be your downfall.”

“That’s not why I love you.”

“But that’s _it_.” Frustration forces him into a whirlwind of motion, and again he paces.  “You don’t love _me_. It’s circumstance and fate that bind us together. It’s not love. It’s never been love between us.”

Each word makes him feel as though he has been thrust through the Bifröst unaimed, unarmed, falling relentlessly towards a crashing fall that will be kind only if it kills him. “You…you do not love me?”

“Oh, but that’s the true cruelty of it.” Tears stand now in his eyes, and then tear loose, silver tracks like colourless rainbows glittering upon his cheeks. “Of course I love you! That’s how they shackle me, that’s how they _bind_ me.” And he’s weeping even as he rants, hands rising and falling as if tearing at those invisible manacles. “Because the Allfather wishes me to kill this child, to purge it from my body and pretend as if this never happened.” Now his hands press to his abdomen, his entire body hunching over it like a curved spiral galaxy collapsing in upon itself. “But I cannot give up the only real piece of you I will ever hold true, even if it will be the end of everything there ever was between us.”

Everything about him suggests that none should touch him, that none should dare even step close. Still Thor does, one hand outstretched to shoulder. “Loki—”

“Do not touch me.” He thrusts upright, eyes dry now, though his cheeks bear the stain of his silvered agony. “I cannot stand for any more of this.”

With shaking hands he pushes to his swaying feet. Thor aches to reach out to him, to wrap his arms about him and hold tight. All his has to offer is the simple truth. “I love you.”

“ _Stop lying to me_!” The scream reverberates around the entire meadow – the entirety of Asgard, it seems. But then all Thor can see is the world of misery in his brother’s eyes. “Haven’t I been lied to enough?”

“It’s no lie.” He holds his golden head high, sets his jaw. “I am no liar.”

“No, that is me. I am the liar, and I am also the lie itself. I am nothing more than a vessel for the truth wrought of lies.” Abruptly the croon of his voice drops away, and he droops like a tree denied sun and sustenance and the simple promise of being allowed to grow unfettered. “…just leave me be, Thor. You have played your part, you needn’t see me again.”

“I always see you.” Confusion wars with frustration, but then that is how it always has been between them. “Even when you’re not there, you’re always there.”

“Poetry does not become you, Thor. Especially when it is as weak as all that.”

“You have been by my side all my life,” he goes on regardless, dogged and determined. “You think I would let you walk away now?”

From the space he has forced between them, Loki can only stare. Then again, that bitter choke of irony. “We are not _allowed_ to do anything.” Raking a hand back through his hair, he shrugs. “The Allfather wishes me to destroy this child, but he must know that even if I try, it would never be allowed. It is in motion already.”

“What is?”

There are days when Thor does not know how it is, that his brother has not just smashed his head into a tree in the hopes that will make him less of an idiot. “The turn of the worlds, you fool.”

“I would never let Father take your child.”

And his lip curls. “You already have.”

“Those children were not my own.”

“Oh, and so that makes them less in your eyes?” He yanks back, and for the first time Thor realises he has stepped forward, has wrapped one hand right around his brother’s right biceps. “Let _go_ of me, Thor.”

“No.” It is an easy truth and it will not be denied. “No, I will not.”

“Then what would you have me be, brother? Your caged bird, pretty and flightless, kept safe in the darkest corner of your chambers so that only you might occasionally wander past and whistle whatever tune you want me to sing that day?” He wrenches free so hard there is a ripping sound, but it is nothing compared to the cracking of the soul behind those bright impossible eyes. “I will not be your toy, your plaything. I am more than what fate would have me be.”

“Then why don’t you believe me when I tell you the same very thing?”

“Because what is there to believe in?”

“Love.” He waits for no answer – he is action, he is force of nature, and all he wants to do in this moment is capture his brother’s mouth and silence it with a kiss. It is hard and harsh, and draws no reaction from his brother. When he releases him, he finds Loki stares, pale-faced and still.

“Love is for children,” he whispers. “Children who _lie_.”

“You can believe me,” he says, gentle when he tries again. This time, Loki reacts. This time, Loki _bites_ – and Thor rears back to find Loki’s bloodied smile shows all of his teeth.

“Then make me.”

A low growl, scarcely recognisable as coming from himself, bubbles up – then he is upon him, fingers tangling in his dark hair, pushing their faces so close together it is as if they cannot breathe. But in a way he does not want to breathe. All he wants is what he can taste; if he could spend his life with only Loki to sustain him, then no matter how long it does or does not last he thinks it would be worth the price of Hel or Valhalla.

Loki’s hands move up, tangle themselves in Thor’s hair in a mirror of his own motion – but then he pulls. _Hard_. Thor hisses, and again Loki closes his teeth upon his already bloodied lip. In response he cannot help but draw back. Though he has no real intention of letting him go, Loki catches the momentum and amplifies it, then shoves him back so hard he stumbles and goes down on one knee.

Free now, Loki stares; he is silhouetted against the sun in its downward curve, bringing with it the promise of night inevitable. “And if he cast you out for this?” he whispers fiercely, hands balled into fists, looming over him like a cast shadow. “I am no Odinson, not in blood. If he disowns me, it is only the way of the worlds. But what of you? What would you do, if your own father abjured you for what you foolishly believe to be the right thing?”

“He could not cast us out – we are both his sons.” Struggling upward, Thor stumbles once, twice, three times before gaining his equilibrium. The whole time Loki is as stone, never once offering a hand, and Thor grimaces. “You heard him yourself, we are at war with the Vanir. Why would he deprive himself of two of his greatest warriors in his greatest hour of need?”

“ _You_ are his greatest warrior.”

“And _you_ are his greatest seiðmaðr,” he parries just as swiftly; Loki only laughs.

“And so what does that make us, Thor?” The scorn still cannot quite mask the misery that lurks beneath. “We are not his children when it comes to such matters. He calls himself the Allfather, but his is king before he is a parent. And we are merely his pawns in the games of war between realms.”

“Why are you resisting this?” Thor asks, and he hates the plea in his voice even as he deepens it. “Why can’t you believe that no matter what Father does or does not wish of us, that I love you?”

But it is as their mother had said – Loki has played too long with words, has twisted them too often and too well to not be wary of how others might do the same. He fears the simplicity of what might be the truth – and that, Thor knows, is what holds him still, it what makes him stare as if blinded.

It is also, he knows, the reason why the moment he reaches for him his body melts like stolen sunlight and spirals up to the sky.

“ _Loki!_ ”

His feet pound the paths, but there is no real desperation to it. Thor knows where he is, again. It cannot be any other way. It is only the tyranny of distance that he loathes, and so he fights his way to close it between them, slamming open the door of Loki’s rooms before immediately pushing through to the bedchamber.

Loki turns from where he has braced himself against the high ornate mantel upon the eastern wall. The fire is kindled, though it is not cold outside – but it is freezing inside, for all he has shed his clothes. With it he has also shed his glamour. There are two great mirrors bracketing the fireplace, and Loki moves to stands before one in the skin he had been born to.

Cyan and ridged, blue-blush and cool, and now Thor can see how the patterns upon forehead and cheek curve about his body in full: they entwine about long limbs, twist across the plains of his shoulders and dip in and around the indent of his spine to form a branching symmetrical pattern not unlike the world tree. It then arches anew over the swell of his buttocks, the trailing lines following the curvature of thigh and calf to go down as far as his toes with their black nails.

Then Loki looks up from his entwined hands and there they are once more – those red eyes, so very different from everything that Thor has ever known of his brother. They give him pause. Everything else is Loki, just…in a different form. He has seen Loki shift enough times to know that his brother is never far no matter what he appears to be; he need only recall Sleipnir, or the times Loki has accompanied him across the realms in the form of an eagle or hawk or once or twice a raven, when the Warriors Three or Sif expressed some objection to his company otherwise. But there had always been in his eyes at least a glimmer of that sly green, watchful and true.

These eyes, they are only red. They are as the blood they do not share. And Thor abruptly realises he does not even know what colour the Jotnar bleed.

“And there’s your truth, Odinson,” Loki says, for to him Thor has always worn a glass face. “I disgust you, do I not?” And he turns back to the mirror with his hands held before his hips, mouth twisted in sharp mockery of a smile. “Though likely not as much as I disgust myself.”

“Loki,” he says, and anger swells in him. This is not his brother, even though it is -- because a frightened creature lies trembling and hidden behind the crimson veil of anger and frustration and fear and then suddenly it doesn’t matter because he has him by the arms and his skin burns and he doesn’t care as he leans down to fit their lips together though the edges are ragged and painful because Loki won’t let him and it’s like swallowing sharp ice but he pushes him against the mirror so hard it cracks ice begins to flow and _he just doesn’t care_.

Perhaps peculiarly, perhaps not, Loki is stronger in his Jötunn form. He pushes back hard enough to make Thor stumble. But he will not be denied. Pushing forward, pushing back, Thor sends shards of broken glass to gather beneath their feet. It must be hurting him. But then Loki bites and Thor is bleeding too and it hardly seems to matter anymore.

“Let go of me,” he hisses, teeth still caught upon his lip, and Thor is the one to laugh now.

“How could I?” Digging his nails into that cold blue skin, the ridge of a swirled pattern scraped beneath like a brand, he is the one to laugh this time. “You said so yourself, it’s the bonds of fate itself that join us.”

It’s a snarl he gets in response – or perhaps it is something more like a sob. Then his teeth close about his neck and it burns. Gasping, he stumbles back, then Loki forces him down with legs spread so his knees bracket his hips; between them his cock is hard with the head purple-flushed and rising from the dark thatch of hair betwixt them. His heaving chest is a cartographer’s dream, a veritable map of his inheritance stark against his blue-blush skin.

And the long-fingered hands come down either side of his head as he leans close, the curtain of hair falling forward to blocking out the world, leaving Thor no-where else to look but at his red red eyes.

Not that he would want anything else.

“If you lie to me in this, Thor,” he whispers, searching and stark and serious, “I will take everything that you are and were and will ever be and tear it all to pieces.”

His own breath comes harsh and hard and at first he cannot speak; Loki grimaces into that silence, lips curled into a grimace. Then, he shouts. “ _Do you hear me_? If you ever take your heart from mine and try to give it to another, I will rip it from your chest and devour it whole.”

“Loki,” he gasps, and he wants to laugh even as he wants to cry, “Loki, I don’t have a heart of my own anyway.” Tilting upward, his lips against his brother’s, he smiles. “The day father brought you home from Jötunheimr was the first day I realised I’d only ever had half a one to start with.”

Loki rears back with the shock of it, recoil of perfect indecision. Then, swift and knowing: “I _warned_ you about that damned poetry, Thor,” and his lips crush on his and Thor arches up until their hips meet and their cocks grind together and it doesn’t hurt anymore. Loki is still wearing his Jötunn skin but nothing about him hurts, at least not in the sense of before when even the brush of his skin had been like ice burn. Now it is just the shiver of his touch across his skin, cool and welcome, like nothing else he has felt before particularly when one hand moves between them and holds _hard_ , ice against forged heat. His head slams back against the floor so hard he sees stars like the path of galaxies across the sky and Loki laughs, pumps him harder.

“Oh, you _like_ that?”

The heat skipping across his skin like loosed electricity is not all from the fire. And when he pushes up, dislodging Loki, that same firelight dances across his brother’s skin, orange crimson ochre on blue, shimmering in those red red eyes that are not Loki _but they are Loki_ and he reaches forward reversing their position as he shoves him down hard upon the rug and grasps him tight.

Loki gasps.

“Oh, _you_ like _that_?”

“I would have believed that rather obvious,” he hisses, spreading his legs like a wanton. And it is; his cock twitches between them, hard and leaking and clearly yearning for Thor’s touch. There’s a different sheen to it in this form, like melted ice; when he lowers his head and curves his tongue about the tip, he finds it tastes different too. But it’s still the same, in the end – because when he looks up at those eyes, crimson and hazed with lust and desire and deep dark _want_ it is always the same. It is always ever Loki. Everything about him is wrought in a new form, but this is always the Loki he has known since before memory.

And in that he cannot hold back. It likely will hurt him, he knows, but then it seems as if he wants to hurt and Thor can understand it because when he leans forward, pushes forward, shoves his length into his brother with no further preparation Loki’s hands become claws and rend twin trails down his back and in that pain he is made free. The marks Loki rips into his skin are bloodied and asymmetrical and nothing like the beauty of what twists and turns across his Jötunn skin but it does not matter when he sheathes himself fully in that chill grasping heat. With nails anchoring him in berth Thor groans, shudders, stills at last.

Beneath him Loki breathes hard, eyes watchful and bright. The fire at his back is hot and dancing and laughing in its grate with the chill beneath him and the burning heat of crimson eyes. And Loki smiles, teeth startlingly white beneath the blue chill of his curving lips.

“What are you waiting for?” Legs rise, twine about his waist so tight for a second Thor is choked of what little breath he has caught again. “Because I’m waiting for _you_.”

“I’m waiting for nothing,” Thor says, rough and broken. “I believe we’ve both waited long enough.”

And with that said, Thor fucks him. Though he has never been one for elegance or poetic ornamentation of reality, he does not think even Loki Silvertongue himself could find any other word more apt for what they do. In and out he moves, hips slamming and pelvis bucking and Loki shrieks and screams and claws and pummels and there is blood dripping between them and Thor doesn’t care.

And Loki doesn’t care either, not even when he picks him up to fuck him hard wherever he can find resistance enough: against the wall, upon the worktable with ink and quill and paper and ancient tome scattered to the four corners of the room; then, upon his bed, rolling like thunder; the storm should not be so long in breaking, he thinks hazily, but then he cannot think. He has broken so many times over it doesn’t seem to matter.

When it ends they are together still, tangled upon the rug where they had begun. Beneath them lies the soft white fur of a monstrous winter-bear Thor had killed many moons ago, its pelt brought back home as a gift for the brother who had told him of where to find the rare hunter’s treasure. Though he had declined to join him and the Warriors Three on the hunt, upon no less than three separate occasions Thor had seen the great hawk circling overhead, blue-black wings blotting out the sun, each time loosing a mournful cry that could have been a laugh. Every time they had been seeking the wrong way; every time, it had turned them right.

Thor lies beside Loki now in silence, hand tangled in the sweat-damp hair. Beads of ice have formed like seed pearls amongst the darkness, but it is not uncomfortable. Wondering, amazed as he so often is by his brother’s hidden talents, Thor cannot help but be awed at how quickly Loki has taken complete command of a form he had not even know to be his until mere hours before.

“This is who I am,” Loki says in that quicksilver way he has of divining Thor’s every thought, and even in that softness a bitter edge rubs the raw wound; Thor shakes his head, one shard of ice slipping free to slide down a warm finger and to the fur below.

“It is but one facet,” he corrects, and gives a lopsided smile. “You are a diamond, Loki. Many-faceted, brilliant, always shining. Adamant and stubborn and yet infinitely the more precious for it.”

“Sentiment and poetry,” he snorts again, though his own hand is tender where it pokes him in the chest. “How many times must I say it? They do not suit your clumsy warrior tongue.”

“Everything you wear suits you.” Reply given he catches his wrist, presses a kiss to his palm. Then, his eyes cannot help but move down, curious as they seek the inverted curve of Loki’s abdomen. Sudden concern coils low down in his own gut. “We…did not harm…?”

With a sudden spasm of renewed fury Loki sits up, eyes ablaze. “You think I would ever do anything to harm my own child?”

A sigh escapes him and he does not stand, does not even prop himself upward. Instead he rolls onto his back, aching and bleeding though it still does, and covers his eyes with one forearm. “ _Loki_.”

“Thor.”

Though the word is mocking, Thor does not allow it to continue; he moves his arm, locks his eyes upon Loki’s, and waits until he falls silent. “This child is our blood,” he says, quiet and true. “So let us do this together. I will not let you face the Allfather alone.”

Loki looks as if he wishes to turn, wishes to storm away – and that would be so perfectly _Loki_ that Thor could not even be surprised if he did. So often he thinks to fight his battles alone, as if his seiðr and his silvertongue could never be used in battle with the traditional sword and shield. Then, suddenly, he drops down again, his slim body bowed with weariness. “This will not be easy.”

“I don’t think anyone ever said fate was supposed to be.”

The look this earns him is both exasperated and amused, despite his darkening mood. Thor reaches out all the same, lays his hand upon his brother’s knee – and for the first time since he had stormed into his brother’s chambers, that touch changes him. It ripples along his skin, an outward press of warmth and familiarity rendering the skin clear Aesir-pale once more, stark contrast to the green eyes Thor has known all his life. But in them now, Thor can still see the ruby-sheen of his Jötunn form. Sudden and silent he leans forward and presses a kiss each to each. Loki pulls back, startled.

“Thor?”

His smile is as crooked as the ground beneath their feet. “We should dress,” he says, and frowns as he realises he is unsure as to where most of his light court-armour actually ended up. “I believe it’s time we told Father of our decision.”

Loki stills. “What _decision_?”

“The child is of our blood.” He pauses, and his next words are a bare whisper. “Though even then it is not blood that binds a family together.”

Loki’s answer is a silence as pure as the yearning in his eyes.

“It is love,” Thor adds, soft, and when Loki speaks it is as if his heart is both broken and remade anew.

“And what of fate?”

“I am the god of thunder and of war.” And he does not climb to his feet alone; first he clasps his brother’s hand, and only then does he rise with a smile upon his face and conviction in his heart. “And I always do desire a good battle, do I not, brother mine?”


	3. We Think Of The Key, Each In His Prison

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Warriors Three and Sif finally have their say, Frigga is the mother one must always hope for, and Odin Allfather makes a ruling that might just change all things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, this took a little bit longer than I thought. There are a few reasons for that, but probably the most relevant one is that BY LORD **A WILD PLOT APPEARED**. ...not that you can see it here. Not that I even actually _know_ what said plot is actually going to be exactly. But I can _feel_ it coming, and because of that I now know what is going to happen all the way up through chapter eight inclusive, and in fact have chapter four all plotted and dialogued out. As well as various snippets beyond.
> 
> The bad news is that I have no idea how long this damn fic is going to end up being.
> 
> So. My other major comment here is that I am only passingly familiar with the comics and therefore I am borrowing elements of the 'verse with very little regard as to where I got them. My excuse is that this is all a movie AU anyway so yeah. Er.
> 
> I apologise in advance if this is all just me going off the rails, by the way. Because for all the rumours of THE ONCOMING PLOT chances are I really am just talking out my ass again.
> 
> [cries in the corner]

They require no words to make the decision that they should immediately present their resolution before the king. Still, it is Loki who insists that it is first necessary to render themselves more presentable before they go to do so. Thor cannot complain, not when Loki takes him by the hand and whispers how such things can be made to pass.

For almost as long as he can remember Thor has preferred Loki’s bathchambers over both his own, and the more communal ones that are part of the training wing of the palace and also the weapons halls in the heart of the city. He’d never been sure why; his own are undeniably somewhat finer, and then he misses the camaraderie and conversation of warriors after a fine day spent in bout and duel and spar. Yet something about Loki’s chambers always drew him back long after they’d left childhood and adolescence: the slightly odd lines of it perhaps, or the fine sheen of green-veined marble when damp, or maybe the startlingly beautiful view over the western gardens.

But now he understands. The site of the bath is angled even as it curves into a depth that is somehow _just right_ , with the water and its warmth lapping at his thighs as he presses Loki against its side; impossibly long fingers grip hard the carved sill of the opened window, legs spread wider as Thor pushes deeper in. That is what keeps him here now, he thinks in hazy revelation as Loki gasps and keens beneath him, inverted curve of his back like an invitation into forever with his head thrown back. And beyond them both is laid out the starry sky that cradles Asgard like a treasured child, revealed like a dream always dreamt with eyes wide open: supernova and star and galaxy and aurora tangled together with the promise of the arching rainbow bridge that would cross all to take them wherever they pleased.

But Loki is in his hands and he is infinitely more precious than even all the realms themselves: starlight made flesh, pale and gleaming with his hair a dark corona, green-gold eyes reflecting the aurora in shimmering shifting ever-colour. It is if Thor has stolen him down from the heavens, this impossible creature of beauty and passion and keen deep intelligence – but then, he thinks, something so precious can only be given, never taken. And yes, this is why he prefers Loki’s bathchambers. He’d just never known why, until now.

In a peculiar way he barely even feels his release creep up on him. He simply moves with the lap of the ever-filling, ever-draining water, the constant song of running water a sensuous melody along his exposed skin. The slap of damp flesh, loud as it grows with his quickening pace, cannot mask the sounds that Loki cannot contain. It sends a special thrill all of its own down Thor’s spine, for it is so very at odds with how Loki normally holds himself. Throughout their long lives Thor has seen Loki in enough war councils and conversations and battles to know the near-terrible strength of his control, the preternatural way he keeps his peace. A thousand times and more, while Thor and Odin have shouted each other down Loki has stood silent and watchful at his observant distance, hands clasped and tongue in still serenity. In that he has always been so very much like their mother.

In the weapons vault, that had frightened Thor more than even the revelation of Loki’s heritage – the fact that the Allfather’s words had taken his brother’s composure and torn it all away to leave behind a fresh strange creature of volatile fury, broken and bleeding. He’d wanted to hold him them. He wants to hold him now, to put him back together. So far his efforts seem effective enough – though he cannot be sure how long his clumsy hands can work a task so unnatural to them, for all he holds a hammer made both to break and to build.

_Is this why I have to put myself inside you? Is this why I can’t look at you without desiring to touch you, to draw you close even when you roll your eyes and push me back? Because the only thing I have to offer you is this? Because the only thing I can do to put you back together is fill up all the holes and fissures and great yawning emptiness with all of myself instead?_

The thought barely completes when Thor comes, sudden and hard. Loki’s hands tighten on the sill even as he clenches down hard, milking Thor of all he has to give. Yet he himself is not quite finished, hips still seeking the friction and pressure that will lead him to his own freedom.

In the grips of his rippling release Thor reaches around, not wanting to move through such pleasure and pain alone, not when Loki is so close. First Thor grips him. Then, he _jerks_. Loki whines, then he shrieks; Thor has been too rough, perhaps, blunt nails dragging across velvet-soft skin. And now Loki’s own nails are in his shoulders and then the delicate skin at the nape of his neck as he jerks around and presses their lips together as he comes all in a rush in Thor’s waiting hand.

The pattern seems to be emerging, that it is always Loki who draws away first. Thor lets him go, lets him sink back against the bath edge. But he tells himself it is all right, because the image Loki presents is not that of someone drawing back, walling himself away. Instead his legs are splayed still, mouth parted on a forgotten word. He almost seems half-drowned in emotion, his hair damp and curled about the debauched curl of his lips. In this he is so very real with everything stripped away, from the tight-coiled leather of his court armour to the urbane mask he wears as easily as he breathes the air itself.

“We are _supposed_ to be getting clean,” Loki says, languid and lazy, as if this is all Thor’s fault, as if it had not been Loki who had dipped close to his ear and said _it would be quicker, yes, if we bathed together?_

When Thor looks down, it is to what he holds still in his palm. Loki chuckles again, as if his brother plays ever the fool – and he supposes that is why he is struck with the terrible childish urge to reach forward, to cup his brother’s head and card his fingers through his damp dark hair.

“Thor!” Aghast, Loki jerks upward, pushes at him. “That’s disgusting!”

It’s not, he thinks – the white upon black is stark and sudden, and so very at odds with the many shades of grey in which Loki lives his life. “I suppose this means we can’t get out yet,” he says, all smug satisfaction as he reaches for one of the fine sponges arrayed upon the shelves. “So let me aid you, brother. I think you shall find it is but one of my many hidden talents.”

“Your talents are all hidden,” he grumbles, and Thor raises an eyebrow with injured pride even as he begins to squeeze fresh water all over his brother’s hair.

“I thought I was rather fine with my hammer.”

Loki splutters under a fresh onslaught, and when he glares up at his brother from beneath his eyebrows Thor is charmed by Loki’s sudden resemblance to a drenched cat. “And if I say so, how big shall your head grow with the compliment?”

“Which one?”

“Stop it.” Loki bats his hand away, pushes his own hands back through his fresh-soaked hair. “I warned you about the poetry.”

“Even bawdy poetry?” Letting the sponge fall with a splash, Thor steps forward again, smile knowing and ready. “I’ve have thought that the very dominion of the fat-headed warrior beast that you name me.”

And Loki steps back, shaking his head. “We are not in a banqueting hall, and you are not telling tall tales to impress either the ladies of the court, or your dull-headed warrior companions.”

“No.” Something has changed in the air between them, the easiness of moments ago draining with the bathwater, but Thor tries again. “I’m only ever trying to make myself worthy of the only person who matters at all.”

Loki, hard against the far edge of the oversized tub, stills. And then he stares. Thor has hit a nerve, both one raw and exposed, and he had not even seen it. All he can do is stare back, uncertain, quite without words he was never proficient with anyway.

At last Loki looks away, down. Though the rest of him remains painfully still, his fingers dance like loosed quicksilver beneath the surface of the ever-moving water.

“So we tell Father that the child will not be harmed,” he says finally, softly. “And then…what?”

“What do you mean?”

“We cannot tell anyone of its true parentage.”

Loki still will not look up, and that is why Thor grasps his chin, forces the startled green eyes to meet his. “You have no choice in being named the babe’s mother, I know this,” he says, rough and rasping, “but I see no reason why I should have any choice in being named the father.” His free hand moves into a tight fist, and he speaks through teeth clenched tight. “I would declare it myself, before all of Asgard!”

And even with his jaw held half-motionless by Thor’s unrelenting grip, Loki’s words are smoothly spoken and oh so very true for all the entire realm names him Liesmith. “But you can’t.”

“Why not?”

He knows he sounds a child, and Loki knows it too from the scornful glint in his eyes. “And this is the other reason I was given you, isn’t it.”

Dropping his hand at last, his eyes move down and he tilts his head sideways. “You weren’t _given_ to me at all, Loki,” he mutters, and his brother gives a little rolling chuckle.

“Oh, so you _took_ me?”

“You gave yourself. As I gave myself to you.” Now he looks back, fierce and unforgiving. “I won’t hear you speak of it any other way!”

Narrowing his gaze, Loki challenges that not with words, but with the tempered fury in his flashing eyes. Before that, Thor despairs; for all their closeness of moments before Loki feels as suddenly distant as the stars hung in the sky. Then, abrupt as the equatorial night, he sighs and shakes his head. “See it as both Father and I already have, Thor. We are brothers, in competition for the throne of Asgard. From the beginning there were those who said I never should have been born, accepted me only because we were both conceived in war and in blood. In those uncertain days, a second might be needed. Yes?”

Unwilling as he is, Thor still must bow before the truth. “Yes.”

“But as I grew, it became apparent I was not as I should be.” A long-fingered hand rises, white and stark in its silencing gesture. “Don’t start. If you wish to argue this point with me later, you may, but we simply do not have the time enough now.” That same hand then moves back through his hair, and again he expels a long breath before he goes on. “The truth of the matter is, many people see me standing close by your side, near to the throne, and given the balance of our relationship – the golden honest warrior, the sly silvertongue shadow – they cannot help but think I crave your throne.”

“And do you?”

He could bite his own tongue off for having spoken so aloud, but to his shock Loki just gives a light shrug. “No. I never have.” But Loki also gives Thor no time to dwell over such matters. “See it their way, which is this: my child is just a way of cementing my place, of giving myself even more access to the throne and the one who sits upon it. I would be brother, son, and mother to kings. And still technically in line under my own merit.”

Under such logic, Thor is buried alive.

“And there is the question of blood relation.” His hands have by now moved to his lap, where they curve together like uneasy crescent moons. “We know it is not so, but it could be seen as rejection of the ladies of the court, of the high nobles who would offer them to you.” Again Thor’s brow furrows, and again Loki will not give him chance enough to speak. “And though it would not be said aloud, of course, there would be warnings of the dangers of breeding son to son, particularly one as volatile as myself. That is how madness and inherited disease move through to ravage entire bloodlines, Thor. And I think I am thought quite the snake in the grass even just as a trueborn son.”

“Can we not…” Loki is letting him speak now, and somehow that is worse than not being given leave to do because Thor is stumbling, unable to work out what on Asgard he could ever say that Loki’s quick and clever mind would not have already thought through and discarded as useless. “…would you _wish_ to be known as a Jötunn? Not Laufey’s son, if that will bring his wrath down upon us now when we have other concerns, but…perhaps a babe Father rescued? A peace token?” Immediately he grimaces, cursing himself for a fool. “Not that I see you as a _thing_ , I just…”

His head moves, barely enough to be named a shake. “It might pass, though I do not believe it would for long.” Rising now, he slides back into the water with that strange stiffness that is so at odds with everything Thor has known before of his brother. “The Jötunn are a proud people, Thor. Even if they thought Odin had merely snatched a swaddling babe during a village raid, they would take it back as a matter of honour, no matter how it had been raised. No matter _what_ it had been raised.” Now he stops, and the long line of his throat works with vulnerable ease as one palm presses again to his abdomen. “…and if it carried the seed of the royal line itself in its belly, why, so much the better.”

“Then what do we do?”

“We wait.” A low laugh escapes him then, catching Thor’s objection and holding it tight; it is with half-despair that he realises how well his brother knows him. “Thor, please do remember that there _is_ a war to be fought, and to be won. When _that_ is done, then we shall remake this world as befits the child we have created.”

Though he speaks simply, as if he observes only the formation of clouds beyond his window, Thor feels a shivers like storm move down his spine. “You…do not truly believe he will bring about Ragnarök, then?”

“It is written in his blood.” His shrug is too careless, his eyes distant for a troubling moment – then Loki is looking to him, light smile upon his lips, stepping close. “But you said yourself, you do enjoy your battles. And this will be a battle, Thor, do not doubt it – for it is fate itself you wage war against.”

“We,” he corrects, hand rising in quick reflex to cradle his brother’s flushed cheek. “We wage it together.”

“Yes.” And he whispers the echo against Thor’s lips. “ _Together_.”

But Odin has laid down his arms for the evening, or so it seems. The Allfather’s audience is denied them, and he will not be available until mid-afternoon of the following day at the earliest. As they turn, walking the corridors together in near-perfect harmony, Thor feels a strange resentment that he has not known since childhood: when Odin was king before father, when all Thor wanted was the intimacy of a parent and received only the orders of his monarch instead.

“It is probably for the best,” he says finally, as they come to a halt just before the doors to Loki’s chambers. They are slightly distant from the guards who are never far from the royal family, for all each and every one is a warrior in their own right, but Thor dips his voice as he gives his brother a wry smile. “Much as I’m loathe to admit to such a thing, I am exhausted still.”

“Yes,” Loki says with a wicked twist of his lips, “as yet am I.”

“And you have all the more reason to be.” All amusement flees from Loki’s eyes then, and Thor must hurriedly speak over it, must pull back on the instinct to press his hand over his brother’s belly.  “I do not see it as a weakness, brother, nor a reason to coddle you. I just…worry for you.”

“You shouldn’t. I can take care of myself.”

“But I want to help.”

The fierce whisper is met with a stare that could have stopped a great snowbear dead in its tracks. Loki is unmoving as a mountain, and Thor winces, tries again.

“ _Please_?”

This at least earns him a cocked eyebrow. “What, no pitiful poetry this time?”

“Shall I compare you to a tiny kitten, that I want to wrap up in the folds of my very best ceremonial cloak and carry around with me all day?”

“You’re calling me a _kitten_?”

“Cats are very independent creatures,” he says, as if he might ever find words that Loki would not be able to poke full of holes. “And you did not see the size of the prairie cat we hunted on Álfheimr. It was so large even Volstagg might have ridden her.”

“Oh, the legendary prairie cat of Álfheimr,” Loki says with all the long-suffering airiness of one who has heard this story a thousand times or more. “I shall believe that story, Thor, when you bring me its head mounted upon a spear.”

“And I would.” Easily he reaches over, takes a hand, presses a kiss to the knuckles. “I would do anything you asked.”

Loki snatches said hand back. “So perhaps you ought then leave me to my rest and return to your own chambers?”

“What?” Blinking, knowing he looks like a stunned yeti and caring not for the resemblance, Thor stares at his brother. “Are you…?”

“Step inside with me first.” Clear irritation ghosts his every movement, but the moment the door is closed he is upon him, all long limbs and questing lips, fierce and furious. Then, he pushes him back, eyes ablaze. “We are not children. And neither am I your consort.”

“You would never be my consort.” Feeling rather as if he has been cast adrift upon seas heaving with Jörmungandr’s uneasy sleep, he tries again. “You would be my other half.”

“This is a game we play, Thor.”

And now confusion blazes abruptly into fury. “I do not see any of this as a _game_!”

“And you actually believe that,” he says, pitying; one long finger digs into the hollow of one eye socket, and he sighs. “Which is why we will lose if you don’t listen to me.” Thor goes to speak, and he waves a hand. “I do not know how this gameboard is yet laid out. I am also unsure of the pieces given us, and those we might appropriate for ourselves. So, until I am sure, we must for all intents and purposes be as we were.”

Nothing of this makes the slightest sense to him, save for the dull implication at the end of it. “Brothers?”

“Brothers.”

Perhaps it is how easily Loki accepts it that makes him angry – because Thor knows it cannot be any other way. Still, his bitterness is a bright untempered flame. “And so we hide our true selves in the shadows, shielding our light as if it were something shameful?”

“You get used to it, Thor,” he says, and his voice trembles with something that perhaps could be named laughter. “In fact, you can almost come to love it.” His hands are steady on his shoulders as he pushes him back. “Now go.”

Thor is missing something here. Knowing as much doesn’t make it any easier to see. “Loki—”

“ _Goodnight_ , Thor.”

With the door closed tight in his face there is nothing more he might do save return to his chambers. Alone in his bed, Thor rests his head upon his arms and stares up at the ceiling, wondering at the next day and what it might bring. He is almost as afraid of its coming as he is desiring – and for that alone, he knows this world will never be the same again.

 

*****

 

Though he hadn’t really expected to sleep, at some point Thor closes his eyes to darkness and opens them to find sunlight painted in wide paths from window to bed. He rises, bathes quickly and thoughtlessly, and then dresses. Leaving his own, he has every intention of going to Loki’s chambers before he does another thing. Yet, despite the early hour and the sleepy set of the entire palace, he meets an entirely unexpected figure coming in the opposite direction.

“Fandral?”

He almost feels as if he is hallucinating; it makes no sense to see his friend at this hour, when by all rights he ought to be buried in the arms of a half-dozen willing maidens and making merry in his return to Asgard. Yet here he stands, blinking in the early morning light. “Ah, Thor!”

“I was just coming to find you all,” he replies, quick in the lie; he thinks with sudden surprise that finally he’s learned a lesson from Loki. “I had expected you to be in the training halls.”

“That’s where I am going, I just…” Uncomfortable, he looks back in the direction of Loki’s chambers with a furtiveness displayed that Thor feels. “I merely wished to speak with your brother first.”

Thor cannot hold back his surprise. “And how did you find him?”

“Well enough.” One gloved hand rises, pushes back through his hair in a gesture born more of nervousness than his usual habit of doing it to make maidens swoon. “I have not have opportunity to speak with him since we returned – or even with you, as it were.”

There’s more confusion in that than accusation, but Thor winces as guilt twists deep into his side. “We have had…some issues, to deal with. There simply has not been all the time for all that I would wish to do.”

“Yes.” Again, Fandral seems to be struggling; for all he has not Loki’s silver tongue, he still does not usually let his own tangle in such knots. “The Allfather…I wished to speak with you both yesterday, but he called you to private conference at the conclusion of the thing, and then I couldn’t find either of you afterwards. Neither of you were at dinner.”

They’d fucked all through dinner. In fact, Thor hadn’t eaten anything at all until after Loki had left him for the night. Even this morning he’d indulged in a just light repast brought by a servant before setting off to find Loki. It’s strange, he thinks – for it is not that his appetite has changed. It remains as large as before. It is simply that now it is something else he hungers for.

Then he looks up, finds Fandral’s brow has furrowed, and he winces. Fandral is perceptive enough, for all he cannot read people the way Loki does. But Thor has a glass face. Now he forces a smile over it, though he still feels so utterly transparent Fandral might very well be able to see all the way into his heart and soul.

“It was a matter of the family,” he offers, knowing it to be weak. “Do not concern yourself, it is dealt with.”

Fandral turns thoughtful, and Thor wonders if Sif has spoken to them of what she’d seen in the high meadow. A moment later, he thinks not; if any of the three would be chosen as her confidant in this, it would likely be Hogun. A moment later, guilt moves through him once more. No matter what has and has not been said, the truth remains: they have suffered too at the hands of the Vanir, and yet all Thor can think of is Loki.

“I should also apologise to you,” Fandral says, sudden, and it is so at odds with Thor’s own thoughts he cannot help but gape at his old friend.

“In what way?”

“I felt badly for how I spoke of him – _thought_ of him – during our captivity.” His long fingers begin to fidget, and he stares at the floor between his boots like a chastened child. “It was unforgiveable.”

“It was understandable.”

“And also unreasonable.” When he tilts his head up, his smile is crooked and yet none the less handsome for it; even after their ordeal, women will fall at his feet. “I still don’t know what even happened, to bring about our salvation. But I _do_ know that it was by Loki’s hand – that whatever he was doing in those hours away from us, he must have been building up strength enough to set us free.”

Too many words unspoken tie Thor’s tongue with bonds wrought of silence. Fandral goes on regardless, unseeing.

“That kind of seiðr…even for seiðr such as his, it was _strong_. I’ve barely even heard of such things even in verse, let alone in reality.” His conviction and sincerity are almost sharp enough to really hurt. “If not for Loki, we would still be in Vanaheimr now. We could even be dead.”

“Yes,” Thor says, voice hoarse. “He only wanted to aid us.”

“And so I wished to thank him.”

“How did he respond?”

Thor almost does not want to know the answer to that; for all he loves his brother dearly, he knows how Loki would be apt to take such an offering. “The same way he always does,” Fandral says with a wry grin. “A little nod, a few well-placed words.” Then he pauses, and to Thor’s surprise he seems almost sad. “Your brother never changes.”

“He does change,” he says, quite without intending to. “But only in the best ways.” And now he’s wearing a broad grin he doesn’t even want to hide. Fandral raises an eyebrow, and suddenly Thor is struck with deep gladness. Fandral just looks much the better for two nights rest in Asgard, his beard trimmed and his clothing fresh and fashionable, his step back to something of its former jauntiness. But even now Thor sees a growing watchfulness in his eyes, a wariness not seen there often before.

“And so we go to war for the slights done our people,” he says, oddly subdued. “And that pleases you.”

Thor’s grin begins to subside. “And it does not you?”

“It is what we were born to.” Again, Fandral looks down, seemingly uneasy in his own skin. “I simply…”

“What?”

“I’m not sure.” And indeed he seems somehow frustrated, generous lips twisted in a grimace. “In council, yesterday, you objected to Loki’s suggestion he accompany one of the scouting parties in Vanaheimr. Why was that?”

It is too swift, too sudden a question; Thor cannot duck his reaction, stumbling right over it like the blundering fool Loki has so often named him to be. “I was merely concerned for him. For his wellbeing.”

“If there is one thing we all have learned, it is that Loki can take care of himself.” Wryness does not entirely suit Fandral, though he wears his thoughtfulness well. “Perhaps not as we imagined before, but he is warrior enough on his own merits, untraditional as they might be.”

“Yes, I simply…” Troubled, Thor trails off; Fandral raises his eyebrow higher.

“There are things we do not know, of what passed in Vanaheimr.” The lingering doubt in his voice is a slowburn of guilt. “Would…would you tell us of them?”

Thor wishes he could, though even if he did try he’s sure he would never have words enough. “In some ways, I am not even sure that I can,” he admits, and passes a hand back through his own hair. “In the end, it wasn’t Loki who saved us. It wasn’t even me.”

“It was both of you.”

“Yes.”And given his clumsy expression, Thor cannot help but be surprised that Fandral understands so quickly – though with his next words, Thor wonders if the other warrior always had.

“So why would you deny him his place in this now?” he asks. “If you are so much stronger together?”

The implication jerks through him like a lightning bolt, and Thor stares at him. “That is not what I meant. I don’t mean to deny him his right to bear arms as an Asgardian warrior.”

“No, possibly not.” Though Thor is the prince it is Fandral who begins to move, inclining his head in invitation. As they begin to walk the wide corridors together, he gives a brief shake of his head. “But come, Thor, I’ve spent so long in your company that I know as well as you do how many times we have left Loki out of our journeys and adventures and hunts and quests. Sometimes I am sure it was by choice, but other times…” He keeps his head high, eyes focused straight head. “…he does not like to be parted from you.”

In the face of that, Thor tries for light-hearted. “Since when are you such a scholar of people’s hearts and souls, my dashing friend?”

“You do not think the ladies love me merely for my looks and long sword?” He turns his head, stops them both dead; with the sun shining directly into his eyes, the bright blue is awash with honey and mead for all the bitter truth of what he says. “Thor, we will shortly be at war. And even if it were not Loki’s personal wish, he should not be barred from it simply because he is not the warrior his father and the realm might have wished him to be.”

Thor goes very still, eyes wide.

“I was wrong about him in Vanaheimr. I’ve been wrong about him many times.” His gloved hands clench into fists at his sides, his voice lowering with relentless conviction. “He should fight with us. At your side, and us the Warriors Three at your back.”

“And…the Lady Sif?”

“Oh, I’m certain she’ll fight where she deems it most appropriate.” Some of his light-heartedness returns to him now as he gives a brief snorting laugh. “And all the luck to you, my friend, should you try to convince her otherwise.”

For a long moment Thor can do little more but stare. These are not words he had ever expected from any of them, and when he speaks his voice is hoarse. “You are a good friend,” he says, “to me – and to Loki.”

“I could have been better.” But before Thor can protest otherwise, he frowns. “Sif has been looking for you.”

“I shall seek her out,” he says with easy promise, but his skin is prickling again as he follows their path to its obvious conclusion. “I will go to Loki first.”

“He’s not there.”

Thor swings around. “Then where is he?”

“I’m not sure.” And Fandral is looking at him oddly, clearly finding something odd in the force with which Thor speaks. “He did not tell me where he was going.”

“I…I shall seek out Sif, then.” And though he tries to be casual, Fandral watches him in such a way that he knows he is failing. “But if you see him—”

“I’ll tell him you wish a word with him.” Then, he presses a hand to his heart, dips his head just low enough in the manner of a lord to his liege. “I shall see you on the council this afternoon?”

“Yes,” he says, and watches his friend disappear in the direction of the rising sun. “Yes, you will.”

It is of course no task at all to find Sif. Hogun is there too, but he is deep in his solitary exertions and Thor cannot bring himself to disturb him in the practice of his forms. Such dedication much be lauded rather than light-heartedly unravelled, and Thor knows from experience that if Hogun is disturbed he will feel obligated to begin anew. Thor has envied him that, upon occasion; while he is devoted to his warrior heritage, he has never known in it the meditative calm so displayed by Hogun the Grim. Thor is a storm, vicious living thing, heavy cloud rich and ripe with berserker flare. It is his strength, and also his weakness.

_But then, is that why I have Loki at my side?_

Sif wages war with three guardsmen. Unarmed, she needs little else but the momentum of her lean body and the measure of her skill; with that she plays easily against each, plays them against each other, and slaves every one to the nature of the very ground beneath their feet. As Thor watches they go down one after the other; when they rise, from the looks on their faces this is not the first time. And when they look back to her it is with a sour, grudging kind of admiration she has earned not today, but in many many years of relentless practice and training.

Yet she takes little pleasure in it. As she raises a hand to swipe the sweat from her eyes, she half-turns and he catches her eye. All he need do is tilt his head; she nods sharply, and turns back to the three guardsmen. A gauntleted hand snaps out, palm and fingers wide. After a moment, the highest ranking reaches back. The wrist-shake is hard, short; she exchanges it with them all, meeting their eyes in silent conversation. Then she turns, comes to him, ponytail bouncing and her motion betraying nothing of exertion whether from exercise or from what they endured together so very recently.

“Thor,” she says when she stands before him, and he gives the little head-nod he cannot help for all she never wishes to be acknowledged in the way he might a lady of the court.

“Sif.” He’s been told his smile is charming, and though he knows it’s a weapon she’ll easily deflect, he tries it anyway. “Deadly as always.”

“It wasn’t good enough.” Her eyes move over the men as they fan out amongst themselves, training weapons drawn. “All I can recall of those days is how very helpless we all were.”

He lets the smile go; it had not been worth much to begin with. “What we stood against was not something we had ever prepared for.”

“We should have.”

Though he understands the source of her frustration, he cannot allow it. “We did not even know what it was.”

“We still should have _known_!” she says, and her voice spirals to a shout. It is not only the three guardsmen who look around now – Hogun pauses, looks over, and the others arrayed in various pursuits about the training hall turn too. Thor doesn’t look to them. His vision is taken up entirely by the compact whipcord of fury glaring him down.

“Sif—”

“Do you even know what you’ve done?”

At first he can only stare. Then, he sighs and shakes his head. He’s unsure as to what Sif knows; had she taken her concerns to Heimdall, he might have spoken to her of more than what would have been immediately obvious from the embrace she had seen in the high meadow. But he does not think she asked, no more than he believes Heimdall has told. Those hazel eyes are still watchful upon him, demanding answer. And for all their hardness there is something vulnerable behind them too, and in an odd way he is almost reminded of Loki.

“Will you walk with me?”

“Of course.” She betrays no surprise at his abrupt offer, though her words are stiff. But there’s nothing of that in her liquid movement as she falls into easy step at his side. Sif remains in her sweat-damp garb, but they do not go far. In one of the small courtyards some distance from the hall they halt, though they do not sit. Instead they stand awkward together.

For many years there have been things unspoken between them. There’s hurt there, he thinks dully, mixed in with a thousand memories and more of a shared childhood. They have known each other all of their lives, as he and Loki have. From a very young age they had known of the whispers that hoped the Lady Sif might prove a suitable bride for the elder prince. Certainly they have discovered in the past that they are well-matched in the bedchamber, even if their interest has waned since the days when they had decided to test their compatibilities for themselves. Or _his_ interest had waned, at least; for the first time Thor wonders if she had made that decision for herself, or merely followed along with the will and him of the first prince of the realm.

Thor strikes first. It has always been his way. Even when he knows better. Even when he has grown up with Loki, who has always taken any such advantage and made it ever his own.

“You are disturbed by what you saw,” he says, and Sif shakes her head like a roused filly.

“I am disturbed by what it _means_ ,” she retorts, and he frowns.

“And I am not. Believe me, Sif—”

“Thor.” He is a prince and she his warrior, but he still stops in the face of her well-deserved question. “I admit, I know not of the deeper mysteries of sorcery. But you do remember I was raised a woman before a warrior.”

“You’re still a maiden now.”

“Of war, rather than seiðr,” she says dryly, reminding him again of how even now he never knows when to keep his clumsy words to himself. “But I know enough of what passed in that chamber to call it a spell of binding.”

That makes him frown. Not one of the Warriors Three or Sif herself had seen into the casting chamber where Loki had been so often taken, where they together had wrought the spell that had broken the wards and let them be as they were – gods even amongst children of the divine. “What are you talking about?”

“When you both came back to us, you covered in enemy blood with Mjölnir sparking in your hand and Loki with his entire body aflame with seiðr, all you said was that you had taken umbrage at what they wished of you. And that they had paid dearly for their presumption.” She pauses, and he sees deep unease behind the insistent question of her voice. “But isn’t that what had been happening the whole time? What changed _then_? What allowed you to become what you were?”

“What we were?” he offers, knowing it weak; she frowns direly.

“Gods.”

“We are Aesir,” he starts, and she jerks her head.

“You were more than that then.” And there it is again, something he had thought to have seen then but dismissed only as imagination wrought by the passion and the fury of what he and Loki had done. There is fear lurking in Sif’s eyes, buried as it is beneath the calm conviction of her warrior’s heart. “Thor. What happened in there?”

“They…were trying to work a prophecy.” He can only speak with great reluctance, slow and painful. “They thought Loki was its centre.”

“And he wasn’t?”

“Not in the way they thought.”

She looks away from him to consider this, her brow furrowed and her fingers working into fists. “And somehow you and he together…”

“Like you said,” he says sudden and almost reckless, “a binding spell.”

She turns on him with the sudden speed of a roused serpent. “You do not even know what a binding spell is.”

“You yourself said you did not either!” he snaps back, and then her eyes are aflame.

“I know not how to work one!” she shouts. “But I can recognise the chains of one when they’re before me!”

And Thor chafes against that idea, the implication that he is prisoner when he knows in his heart he gave himself as freely as Loki had of himself. “We worked magic together,” he says, and Sif gives him an incredulous look she generally reserves for those foolish enough to still believe her no warrior.

“You are not seiðmaðr.”

“But I am a vessel of divine power.” And the hand that so often curves about the familiar shaft of Mjölnir’s bound handle tightens, nails digging into palm. “As is my brother. Joined together, Loki and I can be something far more than our separate selves.”

“That is not what a binding spell is,” she says, almost pitying, and he frowns.

“Then what is it?”

“It joins two together,” she says, “so that never may they be split asunder.”

“And this concerns you?”

His blunt answer is so unexpected, so patently ridiculous to her ears, that she actually laughs. “Oh, yes. It concerns me.”

“Why?” Frustration bubbles up in him like water from a poisoned grotto. “Loki and I are brothers, now and then. We are never to be apart.”

“That was not brotherhood I saw you joined in up in the high meadow.”

His abdomen tightens, but he does not look away from her. If the Allfather himself cannot, there is no way Sif will not shame him in this. “That is between Loki and I.”

“And the entire realm,” she says, and a sudden plea rocks him to his core. “We are at war. Do you really believe that you and Loki can just pretend at…whatever this is between you now, and forget that your place is with your people?”

“Sif—”

“This started in Vanaheimr,” she says, relentless as the pursuit of shadow-fae and their demon get. “And it started with Loki.”

“This is not his fault.” A cool fury settles over him like ice, freezing him as solid and strange as Loki’s own Jötunn form. “And it started long before this.”

“I thought so,” she murmurs, and in her sudden despair he cannot be angry with her, not anymore. She had suffered in Vanaheimr, as they all had – and he can hardly resent her for not understanding, not when she is still as in the dark now as she was then.

“There is much I might tell you,” he says, trying to smooth the roughness of his voice. “But it is not mine to speak of. Not yet.”

“The Allfather knows these things, then?”

He nods. “He is our king. He knows all.”

“He is. And so he does.” Both her hands rise now, and she presses the heels of them to the hollows of her eyes; then she pushes back, disturbing the sweat-laced lay of her long dark hair. But it is the deep pained sincerity of her eyes that catches him, holds him still. “Thor, do not think I do not trust you.”

Something digs into his heart. “So you do not trust Loki?”

“I do not trust the dark shadows I see gathered about him,” she says, gentle in a way that is as alien to her as is his frustration with her.

“You are a shield maiden, not a seiðmaðr.”

“I see what I see.” And then she moves forward, rises onto her toes; the kiss she presses to his lips then is as light as it is sudden. “I am sorry, Thor. But I had to tell you.”

Then she is turning, then she is leaving him – and he cannot let her go this way. “Sif.”

Without pause, she stops, looks back. “Yes?”

“Thank you.” And he means it. “For always being honest with me.”

“I always will be.” There’s only the slightest hint of vulnerability, when she catches her top lip with her lower teeth. Then, she nods. “Whether you care for it or not.” But in her next pauses, Thor flinches even before she speaks. “It simply strikes me as…ironic.”

Irony has never been his strong suit. “What does?”

“That I saw you both with Sleipnir.” The way she shakes his head at his incomprehension reminds him strikingly of his brother, even before she says: “Surely I am not the only one who has looked at Loki, and wondered.”

“Wondered _what_?”

“Your brother is quick, and clever, and far more powerful than even perhaps he realises.” Even in the face of his rising frustration she stands tall, and then drops a low bow before saying quietly: “If he had really wanted to escape Svaðilfari, I do not think anything in all the realms might have stopped him.”

When she is gone, Thor lets the silence lie heavy over his thoughts. Though he does not doubt the veracity of her words, he cannot believe such an interpretation. Loki has long dabbled in magics beyond the understanding of even his tutors; he had outstripped them long ago, become something stronger and stranger than they had ever believed possible. Just because his seiðr is different to what even the Aesir could teach him, it does not make it dark.

 In the distance he can hear the rhythmic, familiar sound of wood upon wood, flesh upon flesh, steel upon steel. It calls to him, rouses the urge to go and spar himself, to smash something into pieces, to break something beautiful. It is not wrong, he tells himself, what he and Loki have done, and what they still will do. Sif cannot understand, because Sif sees not the whole picture, but only fractured parts.

 _But who is to say_ , murmurs a voice in his head suspiciously like Loki’s _, that you yourself truly are permitted to see much more than she?_

 

*****

 

Thor bridges morning and afternoon with a brief meal in one of the annexes near the training hall after a brief series of bouts with whomever offered to spar with him. His frustration seems to be worsening despite it; a runner to his rooms had reported back that Loki has not been seen, and neither has he been to the library or the stables. In fact Loki appears to have vanished into the very aether, and there is little Thor can do about it now.

With that in mind he goes to the healer’s rooms within the palace, reserved for both the royal family and for warriors of renown and great deed who are permitted to rest there during their recovery. Bright and airy, they look out over the calm bay below, their halls echoing with the gentle song spelled into the tranquil work of plaster and precious metal.

Thor can hear laughter long before he reaches the chambers assigned his friend – the laughter of children, in fact. That does not surprise him. In fact it gladdens his heart, for it must mean that Volstagg’s younglings have been permitted to see him. There’s also a higher, tinkling laugh weaving in and out betwixt the others that makes him smile, for it must mean that Hildegund is with them too.

Then there comes a lower laugh – not as low as Volstagg’s great boom but far too much of a baritone to be that of either of his young sons. Thor feels his stomach twist in knots. Then he is moving faster without knowing, without even trying.

He throws open the door. Probably it is done with entirely too much force, because all immediately turn to stare at him: and there he stands with arm thrusting the door aside, chest suddenly heaving more with expectation than with exhaustion, half-bent, eyes wild.

“ _Loki_.”

And it seems Loki is the only one with any dignity left to him, all regal grace as he turns from where he has coiled himself upon one edge of the great healing bed. Marking his place, he closes the book and lays it upon his lap. And all is done with languid amusement as he stares at his brother and smiles, slow and knowing.

“Why, Thor,” he drawls, “anyone would think you had not seen me in an age.”

“It felt like an age.”

Loki deigns only to answer that with a snort. He then looks to the gaggle of wide-eyed children arrayed like geese between their parents at the head of Volstagg’s sickbed and himself at its foot. “Children,” he says with all the didactic ease of a tutor, “this is what happens if you don’t follow your lessons and learn restraint.” One hand rises, elegant fingers uncurling in easy curve. “You see, look what the great oaf has done to the door.”

Startled, Thor turns to follow their gaze – and indeed, there is now a great crack in the finely carved heartoak. But one of the girls – the middle one, he thinks, Gudrun – tugs Loki’s sleeve.

“You can’t say that!” she whispers frantically. “He is the prince! You cannot call the _prince_ an oaf!”

As Thor scarcely bites back on a wince, Loki widens his eyes as he turns them upon the little girl; her own eyes grow as large as those of hare caught in the gaze of a serpent. “Am I not also a prince?”

Though he speaks light, speaks easy, Gudrun swallows a shriek. A scarce moment later Volstagg leans forward to slap him in hearty amusement between the shoulderblades, and even in his clear recovery it still rocks Loki well forward.

“I am gladdened to know that silver tongue of yours remains as quick and liquid as ever!” he says with good cheer, and pauses just long enough to give Gudrun’s hair a brief ruffle before leaning back. Without meeting Loki’s disbelieving gaze, Volstagg turns to Thor. “Though it is true – the prince _is_ a great oaf.” One hand lands hard in punctuation upon his barrelled chest, and again he laughs loud. “But I am all the greater, and perhaps that is why we are now and forever the greatest of companions and brothers in arms!”

Thor catches something odd flicker across Loki’s eyes at that, but then it doesn’t matter because Rolfe, red-headed and perhaps the bravest of the five, is leaning back towards Loki and poking at the book. Immediately the youngest, Gunnhild, turns beseeching blue eyes upon him like a kitten begging milk and Loki for a moment seems almost flustered by the attention. Even Gudrun inches back towards him and the story that he apparently holds hostage between the thick battered covers of the book upon his lap.

Casting a look to Volstagg, Thor finds him watching the unfolding scene with clear amusement – and a kind of sudden gratitude that Thor knows well. They have both seen it many times before, in men carried from the battlefield at cost to their brothers, borne home upon their shields so that they might fight another day, rather than lie shrouded while songs are sung to their families of the deeds that bore them instead to Valhalla.

Crossing properly into the room at last Thor goes to his side, and then to one knee with a hand extended. Grasping his comrade’s wrist, Volstagg grasps it in return and holds tight. Strength has been leeched from him in body if not in spirit, for it is not as it was before: but Thor can feel its shadow, knows its brilliance will come again, in time.

“It is good to see you up, my friend,” he says, as he climbs to his feet again, and Volstagg’s smile, while smaller, is just as true.

“And I am glad to see you.” He tilts his head as Thor takes the seat at his bedside, almost wry. “And your brother.”

Loki does not look up – chances are the children would not have allowed him pause in his resumed storytelling – but even with the briefest glance he allows himself, Thor sees the shift in his spine and knows Loki heard the easy warmth in Volstagg’s words. He can only wish he knew how Loki had interpreted it.

“I hear tell from my comrades of a great battle I missed!” Volstagg says now, drawing his attention back, and Thor gives an ironic half-smile of his own.

“They all did, it was not just you.”

“And what is worse, I missed the banqueting afterwards!” he continues on, and Thor shakes his head; it had only been an impromptu laying out of food and drink to sustain them while the court had milled about them, proof of the fact that they were alive and well and returned from their travails before they had at last been permitted to go and wash said proof from their skin and burn the clothes they had worn.

“It was not so great a banquet,” he says, quiet. “We were not so ravenous as to forget the realm.”

For the first time, a dark shadow moves across his open easy features. “It goes so much deeper than a hunting party inadvertently captured, yes?”

“So much deeper.” Those are Loki’s words – but does not seem to wish to say anything further, immediately resuming his story as the children groan their disappointment.

Looking again to his friend, Thor furrows his brow. “What say the healers? When are you going to be up and fighting again? We cannot have only the Warriors Two. As Loki himself would say, it would throw off the meter in all the songs that must be sung of your valiant glory.”

“Thor, I will not warn you about the poetry again.”

“You see what I mean?” Jerking a thumb in despair towards his brother, he rolls his eyes in long-suffering exhaustion. “We mustn’t upset Loki in his composition. He does so hate to be outdone by Bragi, after all.”

With a smothered snort he continues to read to the children. But it is Hildegund who speaks, leaning forward with long braids of summer-bright hair falling over her slender shoulders.

“Thank you, my prince,” she says as she presses one callused hand between her own, sincerity lighting her eyes until they seem as bright blue glass. “For bringing him home to us.”

Thor has always thought them an odd match; she is slim as a reed and lovely as a sunbeam, compared to the irrepressible ruddy roundness of her husband. But there is undeniable strength in her grasp. It reminds him of his mother, of the few times Thor has been privileged to see her spar. Once it had even been against Sif – and though it was long before Sif had become a blooded warrior in her own right, he thinks even now she would still fall beneath the calm and careful blade of the Queen of Asgard. Thor believes more than half the realm would, should his mother ever take up arms again.

“It is merely what he would have done for me,” he says, finally, though he lays his other hand over hers and presses them tight. “Think nothing of it.”

“I don’t believe anyone could have done what you did,” she says, low and sincere. “Or your brother.”

Though she cannot possibly know the truth, Thor has to force his easy smile. “Oh, what stories have you been told?”

“Not many.” And her own smile is deeply ironic. “But I know enough to understand that Sif does not embellish the truth.”

No, for she is the one who sits at the table and rolls her eyes at the worst excesses of the bard’s tales, even when they make her more of a hero rather than might be strictly true. But then that is Sif: she wants only what is her due, no more and no less. “There is much to be spoken of,” he says finally, and lets her hands fall free. “But it is not, perhaps, for the ears of children.”

“Why not?” The eldest, Alaric speaks; he is old enough to bear a blade and to have self-consciousness enough to pretend not to enjoy the story-telling when Loki’s hypnotic voice could talk the leaves of Yggdrasil herself down. It’s only natural he would take offense to that first. “What is so bad about this story that we can’t hear it?”

“It is not _bad_ ,” Thor quickly says, noting again Loki’s subtle shift of weight in his spine. “It is simply not yet finished.”

“And when will it be finished?” That is Gudrun. “Will Papa have to go to war again?”

She is half-resigned, and though she is young yet there is a woman’s voice behind that of the girl. They are all born of a warrior race, and they are all born knowing their place, whether upon the battlefield or on the homefront. But these are merely children, and knowing that Thor feels his stomach twist, looks over. Loki keeps his eyes upon the text and his hands upon the pages but he has curved forward, as if protecting that with dwells low in his lightly-armoured abdomen.

Then he looks back to the children, assumes the voice he has trained for when he is king. “We must make safe the realms – for ourselves, and those we protect.”

“I will come too.”

“ _No_.” Volstagg speaks in answer to his son, sudden and almost surprised. Then he blinks, hardens his words; Thor knows that he cannot harden his heart. “No, Alaric, you are young yet.”

“I am a warrior,” he protests immediately, and Thor shakes his own head.

“You are warrior born.” The correction makes the boy frown, even as Thor tries for understanding and knows he will fail; no-one had ever convinced him of such when he had been the boy’s age. Still, he goes on. “Your time will come.”

“What if my time is now?”

“There is always time enough.” Loki’s low voice cuts beneath all the others like an underground river, racing and strong and ever-hidden. “Do not doubt, Alaric, that even if this war passes you by, there will be another.” Then his lips curve upward though his laughter never eventuates. “There is always another.”

“Why?” Flosi speaks for the first time since Thor had arrived, and he turns to her. She’s so quiet for all her fierce red curls, like those of her father. They are also built in similar curves, robust in a way that leaves her looking nothing like her mother. But she is the most gentle of them all; like a mother bear, however, Thor thinks she need only be roused to show her strength.

“Why?” she says again, and he senses some of that stubborn strength in her now. “I thought we went to war to sue for peace, so that we need not fight the same battles again in the future.”

“We were all us born to war.”

Loki’s words are as such that they give almost anyone pause; the only people Thor has seen unmoved by them are Heimdall and the Allfather himself. Yet now a small child stares at his brother with her small brow furrowed and her eyes disbelieving. “Is that why so many of us die for it?”

“Yes.” Though he ghosts a smile over his lips, it is only to soften the truth, rather than demean it. “But is the cycle of things. Peace for war for peace.”

“What if I don’t think that’s right?”

Delicate and long-fingered, and yet deadly sure over both sorcery and the blade, Loki spreads his hands to her in easy supplication. “Then you must fight for what you believe in.”

“What if I believe in not fighting?”

Alaric, Rolfe, even little Gunnhild have stopped to stare at their sister, expressions ranging from aghast to fearfully curious to almost encouraging. But Loki raises a hand to halt all other words, his eyes fixed only upon her. “We are children of warriors, we are mother and father to warriors. Is it not our fate to fight? For if we do not fight,” he says, searching, “then what do we do?”

“We live.”

“Happily ever after?”

“No, we just live.” She sets her jaw, stubborn. “Together.”

At first Loki gives her only silence, eyes searching and quick, as if he seeks to read a child the way he might one of his dark tomes. Then, a smile dawns across his face, brilliant against the pale skin. “You tell a better story than I ever could,” he says lightly, and closes the book as he moves to take his feet. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“No!” Gudrun’s wail rises high above the wordless protests of her siblings. “I want to hear the _end_!”

“Come, Loki,” Thor adds, with more geniality of mood than he really feels. “You can’t leave them hanging so.”

“Oh, but did you not wish a word with me?”

Loki is teasing him. Subtly, of course: he does it with just a quirk of his lips, a quick flick downwards of his eyes. It still goes straight to his groin. Thor must swallow back his reflex reply – _it is not words I wish from your lips, brother mine_ – and only just manages to force a cavalier smile. Even so, Sif’s words beat an uneasy soft tattoo at the back of his mind, whispering that nothing is ever quite what it seems...especially not when spoken in the easy tones of the Silvertongue. “No, Loki, it is fine. I am content enough to listen, until you are finished.”

“Then listen,” he says, and the tip of his tongue just ghost along the edge of his teeth before he looks down. “And allow me to…finish.”

And how dreadfully unfair it is, for while Loki has always had a beautiful voice Thor is certain he plays its natural sensuality for all it is worth now; it moves from low and pulsing to fast and furious with dizzying speed as it wanders the worlds of the story in a dozen voices or more.

But they are all enchanted by him, not just Thor himself. Even Volstagg, not one usually for the stories that Loki favours, lies at attention with his healing leg stretched before him. His wife presses against his side, long braids spilled in a curve over the belly which seems to not have been at all diminished by their time in Vanaheimr. And Thor stays in the seat at the bedside even as he longs for nothing more than to go to Loki, to be as close as two disparate bodies might ever be. But with Gunnhild in his lap, Rolfe on one side, and Gudrun on the other, the children have left no room for him.

Except Loki looks up, sometimes. There’s never a pause in his voice when he does so, and there’s scarce indication he even means to do it, at least to the eyes of others. But in those moments Loki is not only with Thor, he is _inside_ him, and nothing else matters.

As the story plays on, moving through a soft scene of reflection and mourning, the children and Volstagg himself are clearly drooping; Thor realises with sudden shock that it is late afternoon, and he has not attended the king. Almost as if summoned, a servant materialises to touch him upon the shoulder. He turns, finds a bowed head and a soft voice.

“Your mother awaits you in the antechamber.”

With a brief frown Thor looks to Loki; he merely raises a brow, again without pause. Mouthing _mother_ , Thor rises and goes to her.

The queen is lovely today in a dress the colour of a sapling tree, the green jewels at ear and throat like fresh buds of new life. Even as Thor goes to kiss her cheek she ducks just around him, smooth and simple, and peers into the chamber. The smile that plays upon her lips is both sweet, and somehow sorrowful.

“They remind me of the both of you at that age.”

Thor follows her soft gaze to the children, ensorcelled as they are still by Loki’s tale. In it he sees reflected the image of his mother, her hand upon his brow, voice warm and soothing as she did the same for them both in years long since lost to time and memory.

“He learned from the best.”

“I know he did.” She wears now that careful knowing little smile that always makes him think people are wrong, when they assume all his brash bravado is inherited only from his father. A moment later, it fades back beneath the grave visage of a queen about her duty. “Thor, your father wishes a word.”

Something twists low in his abdomen, almost to breaking, but he nods with his own calm and inclines his body back towards the sickroom. “We have missed our council, I know. I shall tell Loki.”

“No.” Her hand is light upon his arm, but strong with it. When he looks back in surprise, she just shakes her head. “The council was never called, Thor. And he wishes to speak only with you now. I will stay with Loki.”

Fear is something he has only rarely known; it never becomes any more comfortable, any more familiar. “What is it?”

“Go to him,” she insists, more command than plea. “And then come back. To me, and to your brother.”

His mother’s gentle hand rests upon his cheek, and in both that and her soft gaze his fear quietens, though it does not quite vanish. She might be queen rather than king, but she will let no harm come to her sons. Knowing that, he nods first to Frigga, and then those who have accompanied her: two of his father’s personal guard.

They escort him now in silence through the well-known corridors of the palace, corridors he sprinted as a child and then strutted as an adolescent and now strides as a man; he holds his head high as they lead him towards one of the great arching doorway he knows best. They open those doors before him, wait for him to step through; then they are closed at his back, leaving him to his fate.

 Evening is beginning to fall, but it is only the hour of twilight yet. A single figure stands upon the high balcony that overlooks the realm, one just as familiar as palace and Asgard itself – and indeed, in many ways he _is_ himself Asgard. Yet something has changed, Thor thinks as he steps forward. More years than he realises have passed, for in this shadow against the setting sun his father for the first time seems old to his eyes, his back finally beginning to bend beneath the weight he has carried since time immemorial. And that twists his heart, tightens his chest. Odin has always been strength, always been steadfast and stalwart.

Thor can no more imagine a life without his father than he can without his brother.

“Father?” he calls, uncertain – and for a moment he is confused, wonders who speaks. Then he realises it is his voice that has turned child-like and strange, and swallows hard even as Odin turns, one hand upon the balustrade.

“My son.”

He does not ask him to approach but Thor does all the same, perceiving the unspoken command. Only when he stands at his father’s side, head slightly bowed even in their equal standing, does he dare speak again. “You must know what I have decided.” Odin says nothing, and he pauses, shakes his head in frustration at how he has erred from the very first. “What _we_ have decided.”

“I do.” There is only weariness again in his words, and Thor goes immediately to speak the protest that he knows Loki should be here to protest, but Odin shakes his head, moves a hand across the sky. “Look at what lies before you.”

Though he knows already, or at least believes he does, Thor looks. It is as he has always known it to be: glittering. Shining. The golden realm of his birth and his right, and also his responsibility.

“It is all yours,” Odin says, and his hand once again comes to rest, supporting him against the palace. “Or will soon be, one day.”

Thor cannot look at him, his eyes upon the shimmering unbroken line of the rainbow bridge that leads to Heimdall’s observatory and all the knowledge contained within. “You have not yet confirmed me as your heir.”

“Tomorrow, I shall.”

And Thor feels as though he has suddenly fallen from a very great height – perhaps, even, from the unaimed Bifröst itself. Clenching his hands about the balustrade he actually does pitch forward; when he turns his head, upward and to the side, he is actually breathless. “What?”

“Think hard upon your choices, Thor.” The Allfather reaches out with one hand, lays it heavy and true upon one armoured shoulder. The single eye is searching, ever-watchful even with Heimdall’s two true eyes to work in its place. “For even though war comes, I am an old man, and an old king. I have put off the Odinsleep for too long, and I cannot do so for much longer no matter my duty here.”

Thor struggles for voice enough with which to speak. “What are you saying?”

“Should I fall, I leave this realm to you.” He takes a long breath, releases it slowly, carefully, almost in sorrow. “But in doing so, I leave it also to Loki.”

A quivering rage coils about his heart, and though Mjölnir is far he hears her deadstar-song begin to rise in rhythm with the quickening pace of his heart. “You do not trust your own son?”

“I do not trust to fate,” he says, the correction as sharp as his single eye. “Think of it as a test, perhaps, of your conviction.”

“I love him.” Thor straightens his back, shakes his head. “And no child need be what fate would make of them.”

“And what are you in this, if not a child of fate?”

Thor has never hated his father. Even in this, he knows he never will – but this is not the first time he has hated the way his father and his king can speak such simple truths with deadly clarity that even Loki himself could not twist into something else. “I will always fight for our child. That is the fate I choose.”

“Your fate is to be a king, Thor.” Odin shakes his head, and turns from his firstborn. “And a king is father to all his people, not just his own blood.”

Alone upon the balcony, Thor must watch him go, each step heavy with the burden of kingship and the responsibility that must be borne with it. He tightens his lips, closes his eyes, takes a deep breath.

_You are strong enough to bear whatever you must. You are named the golden prince of Asgard, and one day you shall be its king. Fear not your fate, for it is in your own hands…and when you bear Mjölnir in those hands, who can ever dare defeat one such as you?_

But when he opens his eyes, looks down upon Asgard, he thinks suddenly that all the glittering gold in the universe could never hope to mask the tarnish beneath.


	4. When I Count, There Are Only You And I Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which thrones are taken, in ways...perhaps not quite intended.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter got _way_ out of hand in terms of length. I have my head in my hands, let me assure you -- but the next chapter should be somewhat more succinct. I also swear to god the plot _is_ coming; it seems to me that that these first five chapters are the "honeymoon" period, because it is from chapter six onward that things seem to go rapidly all to hell. You've been warned.
> 
> Also, a lot of the length of this chapter comes from the fact that the latter scene was a bit of a dare I made to myself after a tinychat got out of hand. I sort of started writing the sex scene for fun while suspecting I would crash and burn and then delete, began to enjoy myself, and then...felt the urgent need to justify the indulgence. _Shit_.
> 
> So, basically, I regret everything.
> 
> Also, as an aside: I again am just playing loose and fast with both Norse and comic mythology; I need to have some of the other gods in place for the next chapters, so we can all wave HELLO! together. And then pray like hell that I won't screw this up even worse than I already have. D:

Despite going back to the healing rooms as soon as he could, Thor had only found Volstagg sleeping and his children and his wife returned to the city. His brother had been gone with the others. For all Thor would have had it otherwise, there remains little chance to hunt him out; his presence will be required at the high table where his father will be making the announcement and there is much to be done before that moment comes.

Even now his stomach tightens at the thought. He had wanted to be the one to inform Loki of it: in private, not before all the court. But there is no time, for even as he turns to go to his brother’s chambers there appears one of his father’s advisors, tall broad scholar in robes of white and blue and silver. Thor must be told and taught of etiquette and procedure as wordless handmaidens bring forth his attire for the occasion. Tomorrow’s show and its dress rehearsal this night are not the grand spectacles they ought to have been, but still they still must play out in the manner dictated by both tradition and by fate itself.

And thus in the great hall gather all the high lords and nobles, accompanied by the Einherjar and the court itself, each called by summoning word of the Allfather. At the edge of the maelstrom Thor stands alone in his light court armour; even with Mjölnir a familiar weight at his side, he struggles to remember to breathe. He had thought they would enter as a family, that in such a moment he might have opportunity to pull Loki aside and into a dim corner so he might warn him with word and embrace of the Allfather’s plan, and then remind him of his own affection and need.

But he is announced alone, for his brother and mother already wait within – and he has not even time to take his own place before silence and then song announce his father’s arrival.

Such strange days they live in now, with him at their helm: Allfather and father, then king and country both. Thor had thought him old mere hours before, but now he is shining and golden and strong as he moves through the great hall. With Gungnir to hand his single eye is seemingly upon all while feeling as though it focuses upon him alone. It is the king’s gift, to see all and one, everything and nothing, everyone and no one.

_And so shall this cup pass to me._

“Odin Allfather.” The herald’s voice rings with divine purpose across the great hall, the single strike of a bell resounding around the world. “King of Asgard, and the Aesir eternal.”

All rise to their feet, and he takes his place at their highest centre. First comes the blessing, the raising of the hands, the breaking of the bread. Then the feast is begun, and what seems a hundred voices rise like an orchestra roused to full song.

Though sitting just a short distance from him, Loki is not close enough to touch. The Allfather is to Thor’s left, then their mother, then Loki: the dark curve of his head is bowed in low conversation. In the candlelight his eyes are the glittering promise of a dragon’s hoarded jewels, the flash of his teeth sudden and fleeting.

Thor cannot look for long – he sits in close proximity to Sif, Hogun and Fandral, and they are all the subject of discussion. _Vanaheimr_ moves about the table like a single-worded curse, but its blade seems to slide right through Loki. Then again, he has always been known to rarely contribute to such tall tales, true or false. When he wishes to join the interplay he sings instead, songs both of his own composing and not. Even those who call him the silvertongued liesmith cannot claim to have never been moved by them; Bragi himself has been known to raise sweet mead and concede victory to the second Prince of Asgard, grudging as the action might be.

Knowing all this Thor wishes to draw him in all the same, even as he himself is drawn away. Yet he finds strange gladness in that, both possessive and pleased. Loki holds himself in low conversation with their mother, and then one of their father’s ambassadors; few people are ever given the gift of his full attention, at least when they are aware of it. Still, as Thor chances another glance to his brother, his wame curdles. The Vanir ambassador sits too at the Allfather’s table, and though his eyes are peaceable he seems…watchful. Thor has always found the man amenable enough. Yet, with the uneasiness between their peoples, and then knowing and not knowing how Loki had suffered at their hands, he does not care for the way the Vanir’s eye falls upon Loki now.

_Jumping at shadows, perhaps?_

Loki can look after himself.

 _But he should not have to_.

Discussions ebb and flow about him, all word and cadence familiar with the years which they have all sat together at this high table. It is easy to bathe in the warmth of the high fluting laugh of Freyja as she engages with Nanna, who as always remains close by Baldr for all she has little interest in his talk of war and strategy. Then there is the constant soft knowing of Snotra, who steps close by the back of his chair while moving to speak to Loki and whispers: _what we know is not all that is_ , leaving him to twist and stare as she drifts away once more. But she wears a smile, gentle upon a rounded face that somehow manages to be both girlish and matronly alike. Then Loki is inclining his head to her and she steps close to bend their heads together. It is only natural; reserved as Loki can be, he will always tender respect to a goddess of wisdom.

Then Týr draws Thor’s attention back with an arm slung about his shoulders, turning him towards an argument he had purposely provoked with the sullen Ullr; though Thor might resist there is deep tempered strength there, made no less for the hand that no longer flexes and stretches at the end of his wrist. And Ullr’s eyes, those of the hunter, fix upon him like marking prey and Thor must leave Loki to his scholarly pursuits and go back to his own games of war. He cannot regret it: these are his people, and this is his place, and he is rarely happier save for when he plays at war either in word and tale or in actual action.

The only time he is happier, he knows now, is when the world is silent and still and he and Loki hold its centre.

And of course the moment comes, the one he dreads when once it had been all he longed for. The Allfather stands and the Aesir fall silent, gathered beneath him like a gaggle of children wide-eyed and hopeful for a story of kings and queens and warriors true; of love and honour that fights and bleeds and finally rises again in the great killing fields between friend and foe.

“My children,” he says, and though he has not Gungnir to hand at his table the power of his throneright burns through him like a blazing star, “my people. You know that we are upon the very brink of war, should the Vanir rebellion prove to go deeper than even we know.”

The ambassador watches with even eyes, unmoved – but the silence of the Aesir who flank him on all sides is expectant. No-one can truly say that they wish the destruction of war, though for those such as they it is merely the natural order. In a life near-eternal, nothing can truly stay the same, not forever. Things must be broken to be made anew, and this is in their blood. They are elemental force, forged to be the weapons of war. This is what they are born to.

“We have sacrificed much to achieve the peace that we have existed in for so long – and now, despite all that we have done, despite the honour and the duty with which we have lived, it falls to us now to again take up our arms against the few who would seek to end that peace.” The words echo as he lets them rest between the beats of his voice, and then he moves his head in the scarcest regret. “But this is not the moment to speak of such matters. Instead, there has come the time to speak of the succession.”

Now the silence is deafened by the unexpected. Thor stares ahead, unable to look at Loki even as the Allfather goes relentlessly on, words as inevitable and eternal as his divine soul itself.

“Tomorrow, I will bestow the title of heir apparent upon my eldest son.”

With his father’s hand upon his armoured shoulder Thor lurches to his feet. It is inelegant, unpractised; he wants to look to Loki and still he cannot. Instead he just moves his eyes over the assembled pantheon, his tongue stilled and his heart a hummingbird flutter.

“Thor. Odinson.” The pause hangs heavy, like a weighted blade. A moment later, it falls, and all is done. _It_ is done. “King of Asgard, as will be.”

“To the future king.” Loki’s voice rings like a clarion bell, echoing across the silence over and over so that it seems for a moment he has cast his shadow selves all about the room. But Thor looks only to his place at the Allfather’s table, to where the true Loki stands tall, his golden goblet raised high. “To our king,” he adds, and then his eyes flare with green flame. “My king.”

In the silence all is still, Loki a dark shadow amongst the light. Then the Allfather raises his own goblet. “My son.”

“The son of Asgard,” Loki counters, and without a moment’s pause he throws his head back and drinks his fill. The long line of his throat works as he drains the golden cup dry. When he looks back his eyes are a wild glitter of a loosed fox before the hunt, paused and held still, the cup yet high. He does not throw it to the ground. He simply opens those long clever fingers and lets it clatter free.

The eyes of all Asgard are upon him, but Loki has eyes only for his brother.

Then Thor reaches forward and all those eyes move to him as he drains his own cup. Without looking back to Loki he thrusts it at the floor, the gold-worked goblet left dented and drunkenly rolling upon the tiles. Only then does he take upon himself the challenge and finally meets his brother’s eyes.

Loki’s smile is as much a promise as his last word for the evening. “ _Another_.”

*****

 

Thor does not even see him leave. There’s a flash of guilt to accompany the realisation, but in the end it does not truly matter. They cannot indulge overlong, not tonight. The ceremony in the morning awaits the attendance of all who revel now at the feast and then those of the city itself, and the shadow of potential war and definite battle casts a long pall over even Asgard’s great golden halls. This is not a feast for victory, but rather of preparation, of assertion of the life and lust for battle that runs strong in the veins of every Aesir who sups at the Allfather’s table.

The king and queen take their leave before he does. Thor himself then stands for the final toasts and then borne by the roars and the cheers he turns and strides from the hall, a god apart and alone with Mjölnir close at his side. The noise dims with surprising swiftness, but then he moves quick – although perhaps not quick enough, for a voice beckons to him from the shadows and draws him to a halt.

“A word, if I might?”

He cannot resent it, for all he wishes to go to his brother. Sweeping a low bow, he puts himself willingly at her service. “How should I deny you any desire of your heart? You are my mother.”

“Indeed I am.” Drifting forward, in her ivory gown she is light born from the shadows. “And a queen I am also,” she says, thoughtful, “whereas you shall soon be my king.”

“He acts as though he seeks to make of me a king,” Thor corrects, and his bitterness is a surprise upon his tongue. “But I think more that he is testing me instead.”

“Think more of it as a forging.” Her answer is simple as the long lines of her gown, but none the less beautiful for it. “Now you are within the crucible where all might change – where all can and _will_ be changed.”

Uncertainty shivers down his spine in swift spasm, and his voice becomes scarce whisper. “You…know all?”

“I am your mother, Thor.” The wry smile she wears now is one he has known well his entire life, as is the gentle pressure of her hand upon his shoulder as she raises one eyebrow. “I think you might be rather surprised by all that I know, which you believe I do not.”

“Asking Heimdall is cheating.”

At his near-childish reproach she laughs without sound. “A mother need not ask her gatekeeper for what she has already divined from her children’s faces. You never looked as innocent as you thought, my son.”

That brings an involuntary smile to his own lips; it fades as he struggles to name his feelings and master them. Though he refuses to feel shame in what he and Loki have done and will do again, they had always saved their rebellion for their father. That had been the natural urge of boys growing to warriors, that need to both test and display their newfound strengths against the mightiest of them all. But for their mother, no such games were ever needed. All he ever wanted was her love, and in this moment, even knowing her as he does, Thor cannot help but fear its loss. “But…you _know_? Truly, everything of what… _everything_?”

“Of the child your brother carries?” Even as Thor winces she smiles, her joy a soft and simple thing. “Of course I know.”

“And you…”

“Thor.” One long hand rests over her heart, the other over his. “I am a mother before I am a queen.”

“While he is king before he is father.”

“Such are the ways of the worlds,” she says, unmoved in the face of his bitterness. “And only by opposing forces may the balance be kept. Creation and destruction must be preserved in full so that Yggdrasil itself may stand true, the roots deep and branches unfurled high, the trunk strong and true at its centre.”

“But you know he wishes to destroy what we have created.”

Frigga blinks, just once. “Yes.”

“He says this as king rather than father,” Thor adds, and his frustration rises to a roar. “He would make me king before I am father myself!”

Only silence remains when the echo has chased itself away, and Thor’s heart tightens as the words take true shape in his mind long after they have escaped his lips. He is to be a _father_. Every moment before now, when he had considered his child it had been more in the sense of a warrior protecting his own. But – the truth is simpler. The truth is that this will be not the ideal of a world he had been born to rule and reign over. Instead this shall be the child of his own blood. This spark will grow to life in the cradle of his brother’s womb, and then be born into a world it has been written than he will destroy, _and this child shall be his son_.

And his great hands, more used to war and battle, tighten into fists. Thor has never truly been familiar with children. It had always been Loki who had aided their mother in her work, who had gone with her to birthing mothers to offer his skill and his seiðr. It shames him now to realise he had always casually dismissed it as another womanly pursuit that Loki’s insatiable curiosity had led him to investigate further than any other man might have dared.

But then, for all Volstagg had once made light of it, all mockery stopped the day Loki had assisted Frigga in bringing Gudrun into the golden realm. His wife’s long and difficult birth had not carried away both child and babe as feared, and so much of that victory even Eir had contributed to Loki himself. Ever since the broad warrior’s easy humour had still extended to almost anything and everything – but never ever Loki’s proficiency with midwifery and the arts of the birthing chamber.

“Father should have told us from the beginning,” Thor says finally, hoarsened by betrayal and blind misery; he feels rather than sees his mother’s assent.

“Yes.” Her voice caresses him in an echo of her gentle hand, fingers carding through his hair. “Yes, Thor, this is not how I would have wished it to be.”

What is done cannot ever be undone. Even when Loki had fancifully spent many a childhood night wondering at how seiðr and sword might rewrite fate itself, Thor had known that the waters of the Well of Urðr would always taste the same, no matter how they were taken. Still, his curiosity cannot help but tilt his head up, fresh question working free. “Then how would you have had it be? The truth, from the beginning?”

The incline of her head is as always a graceful curve. “I would have brought him as a son of Laufey to be raised in the house of Odin.”

“You would have kept him as a hostage?”

“I would have raised him as our ward,” she counters without heat. “The future consort of the future king.”

Thor jolts; he had not realised how badly he desires this until his mother had spoken it aloud. “They never would have allowed it,” he says, quiet, almost as he wishes it not true; it hardly seems fair, given they will not have it now. And Frigga just shakes her head.

“They would have had no choice.”

His fingers clench and relax in a constant cycle to match the hoarse struggle of his voice. “So you would have taken Loki as we took the Casket? A spoil of war?”

“These are Loki’s words in your mouth. These are Loki’s fears.” Sorrow shines strong in the eyes she had gifted him as she now presses fingertips to his cheekbone. “And they are no more true upon your tongue than upon his,” she murmurs, fingers moving as if to brush away tears as yet unshed. “But you know that it is an honour, for the son of a great lord to be raised in the house of his liege.”

“They are a proud people.”

“Who ought to have been proud to have one of their own raised to the greatest throne in all the realms.” When she tilts her head, the pearls strung through her golden hair are like tears wrought of ivory. “I would have ensured he would be permitted his heritage, the knowledge of his family and people.”

“But only as consort, and never king.”

“Loki would never have sat upon the throne of Jötunheimr.”

There is something else there, Thor thinks dully in the silence that follows, some other truth as yet unspoken. But it does not feel his place to ask. At least, he thinks it is not; perhaps he is coward and craven after all. And his mother sighs.

“Though I must admit to you that I cannot resent your father’s choice, not truly. Not in my heart.” Again her hand is light upon his shoulder, and for all the armour between their skin he can feel her warmth. “I was given very great a gift, in being permitted to bear Loki in my arms as if I had borne him from my body. He was a precious child, when he was young.” Her lovely voice tightens in nostalgia, like an overtuned harp trembling upon the highest notes. “You were both always so very different. To have two such sons to call my own and then give to the realm…it is a calling any queen should be glad to be entrusted with.”

“And thus are we the two sides of the golden coin of the realm?”

“Yes.” Again she smiles, this time small and amused. “My grave scholar and my brave warrior. But he fights well and true when called upon, whereas you are often more perceptive than even you yourself give yourself credit for.”

“You say you would have told him of his blood, raised him as my consort.” Rubbing at the hollow beneath one eye, Thor struggles through the thought. “But what of our child? The one prophesied? Surely you did not believe then…”

“What is born in love cannot fester in hate.” The flint of her eyes is strong, ready to spark into true flame. “Your father sought to give you such in the form of brothers. I would have sought the same as bonded lovers. But in the end now you are both.” And now her iron-hard words soften, her eyes the welcome blue of a summer sky as she cups his jaw, nods softly. “It will be enough. Believe me.”

He wishes to – Frigga is the goddess who blesses all unions of those who love true and deep, and she with her companion Eir and handmaidens three would give everything of themselves to bring any child into their world whole and loved. Still, one bitter thought takes hold, roots deep as it drinks from a poisoned well. “And yet still you would not have told us of the prophecy?”

“Any prophecy as yet unfulfilled is but words upon the wind.” Her smile is small, secret; it is always Frigga’s way, not to speak of such foretellings as she comes to know. “And what need you fear from the ill winds of fate, you who rides the storm as the lightning born from its very heart?”

Thor must sigh. Though he knows his mother would never knowingly allow him to blunder into true danger or foolishness unwarned or unarmed, he still feels as if he stumbles in the dark. “You have spoken to Loki of all this.”

“Of course.”

“He…” She is a great light in these shadows, but even with her before him he fears that Loki might still lose himself in the shadows, for all he has walked in them most of his life. “…Mother, he was so _angry_ , when he came to know of his heritage.” He can taste blood where he has bitten through the inside of his cheek, and yet the sting of that is nothing compared to the ache in his chest. “And he was so… _broken_.”

“You help hold him together.”

“But what if I fail?” Turning, one hand comes to crash upon a standing column; it shiver beneath his touch, but the palace is old, the palace is knowing, and Thor can lean blindly against its strength. “What if he falls – or flies – all to pieces, and it’s because I have failed him?”

“You will not fail.”

Her hand rests between his shoulderblades, as it had so often when he had been a frustrated child, beating out his temper tantrums upon other columns, other walls, other training posts. As it moves in slow circle, he bites out his desperation. “But how do you _know_?”

“Because you are my son.” Her hand draws back and he follows it around in a blind arc, seeking; she watches him from his side, face grave and lovely. “As is he,” she says softly, “and I am your mother both. In that you may always believe me.”

His voice is half-caught in his throat. “What did you say to him?”

“That is between him and myself.” When he opens his mouth in automatic protest she laughs without sound, a gesture that is so utterly _Loki_ that he cannot speak. And still she smiles. “But I know why you ask, and so I shall tell you what I told him at the last: that I love him. And it is not because he is Odinson, or the brother of Thor, or the second prince of Asgard, the silvertongue liesmith or the single greatest seiðmaðr this realm will perhaps ever know.” She is all the Allmother, and in that she blazes, pure white gold-limned flame in the heart of the palace in which she has raised them both. “Thor, I love him because he is Loki.”

Again her hand rests upon his cheek, eyes bearing the truth like a flame.

“Now go to him. He is waiting for you.”

Leaving his mother to return to the company of her waiting handmaiden, who has remained at far distance while waiting for her mistress, Thor moves swift as an eagle to his own rooms. Striding inside, he finds the antechambers empty. A rush of untoward excitement fills him, though he manages to hold it somewhat in check as he moves deeper and into the bedchamber beyond. Much as he knows this is the time for talk, he cannot help but anticipate what might follow.

There Thor finds him, lean shadow amongst the crimson and gold. Crouched before the fire, Loki carefully works his fingers over the flames to coax them to greater life. Thor does not announce himself, knowing there are few people who can truly come upon Loki unheard. Instead he watches as the clever fingers move in something that might be sorcery, might be mere physical skill. His younger brother always has had an affinity for flame.

“You didn’t think to go to Father this afternoon. While we were with the children.”

Loki shows no surprise at Thor’s blunt words, as though he understands Thor had not quite intended to speak them before all else. “I knew the council had been cancelled.” His own words are as casual as his movements; he braces palms upon his knees as he turns to give his brother a curious look. “…ah. So you really _were_ the last to know.”

“About this, too?” he demands, sudden anger flushing his face; Loki just shrugs.

“No. Not this.” Returning to the fire, he leans back on his heels. The chiaroscuro of fire and shadow sharpens his features, renders them even more thoughtful and distant than is his usual wont. A strange thought wrenches itself free, spills from Thor’s lips in another demand.

“Where _were_ you all the morning?”

“I spoke a great deal with Heimdall.”

And Thor cannot mask his surprise. “ _Heimdall_?”

“We were shielded from his vision in Vanaheimr.”

Loki speaks with the usual half-indulgent, half-exasperated tone he reserves for whenever he has convinced himself Thor will never learn despite any effort he might care to make; nonplussed, Thor is still quite unable to see his brother’s point. When Loki chooses not to elaborate, he must blunder ever onward. “Well, I supposed as much, considering they never found us.”

“He is still having great trouble seeing into certain regions of Vanaheimr.” Still Loki stares into the fire, his eyes taking on a crimson sheen that seems almost complementary to the deeper green beneath. “Given my seiðr and my training, he wished me to follow his gaze and examine the threads I saw there.”

“What did you see?”

“Ward patterns, worked across the world, the warp and weft of which I have never seen before.” The slim shoulders shrug, dismissive of either his own wisdom or his brother’s native ignorance, or perhaps both. “But this is of no great interest to you, Thor. There is no need for you to pretend, not with me.”

The stings of it burns his skin, then burrows far deeper to the raw nerves below. “War is always my interest.”

“The waging of it, yes – the heat of battle is your place, and not the deeper politics that drive it.” Loki raises a hand, takes up the poker wrought with the triplicate face of a dragon slain in legend long ago; with its point, he adjusts the log and the fire that burns upon it. “Let those who know better guide you to where your might is best brought down upon your foes.”

“He cannot see. He _couldn’t_ see.” Thor turns these statements over in his mind, careful and curious. Then he looks up, hands already curling into fists. “He did not see what happened to you there.”

“He did not see what happened to any of us.”

But even that counter does not quell the rising gall. His brother still stares into the heart of the fire and suddenly Thor’s mouth and nose are filled with the scent of memory, muscles aching with recollection, his heart tight with the crippling helplessness he had felt every time his brother had risen, had bowed his head, and walked away from them. _For_ them. And still he holds that suffering to himself, and not even he who sees all can take the burden of such knowledge from him. All who know are dead, and Thor is reaching for him. “Loki—”

“Stop.” One hand has raised, palm outward. Thor does, though only because that is the moment Loki at last chooses to turn and face him, the lean lines of his too-thin face carved deep in the shadows of the fire he had built in his brother’s grate. “Thor, I have no wish to speak of such things. Not now. Not on this of all evenings.”

That hurts more than anything else he could say. “You…are taking this very well,” he says with great difficulty, now on his knees at his brother’s side. And Loki merely shrugs.

“How else would you expect me to take it? I knew it would not be long before he would be obligated to do this, Thor. It comes as no surprise to me.”

“But what difference does it make?”

Loki’s eyebrow arches high at his frustrated confusion, the way his palms slap down upon his thighs. “We are likely going to war, and at the least we are putting down a rebellion that has festered for years in the war-wounds of Vanaheimr. Therefore we, as a people, must know the direct line of the succession. It must be confirmed in such a way that the ruling might never be called into doubt.” His eyes hold that dragon-glitter now, watchful and somehow lustful even as his voice is even and calm. “For one will never know what will happen in war, not until it is long past the stage of knowing better or worse.”

“But…the way this has happened…it should not have happened this way.”

“Are you upset because you are not going to have the grand ceremony that is your due?”

“No!” And he lurches forward, hands upon his brother’s shoulders; he is shaking him to punctuate the words even before he realises what he does. “I’m upset because I wanted to tell you myself!”

Loki bears his anger with no protest, hair falling into disarray as his head rocks back and forth. When Thor lets him still, he raises both eyebrows, gives a small frown as he minutely shakes his head. “And what difference would that have made?”

“It would have made every difference!” The urge to shake him again is strong, but he already knows it makes no difference. Slumping forward, hands still upon his brother’s thin shoulders, Thor’s fingers tighten as he stares at the hearthrug beneath them, between them. “You are the second prince of Asgard, Loki, you have as much claim to the throne as I do.”

“No, I don’t.” One of Loki’s hands works between them, a long finger tilting his chin upwards. “I am the second. And I am not even Aesir.”

“ _You are_.” Thor moves his own hand, thumb braced hard against his brother’s jaw as his fingers work deep in the hair at the back of his neck. “In every way that matters, this is your realm. You love it as I do. As we all do. You would lay your life down for the happiness of its people, and is that not what a king should do?”

Loki tilts his head, and Thor feels his heart skip; he looks so impossibly young with his hair half-curling in the heat of the fire, disarrayed like loosed darkfire about his pale face. “A king should fight for his kingdom.”

“Which is what I shall do,” he counters against Loki’s flat command. “Tomorrow, I want you by my side.”

“No.”

“No?” Stunned by Loki’s even tone, Thor at first can say nothing. When he does speak, it is more with shock than anger. “You can’t say _no_.”

“I just did.”

“I am king!”

“Not yet.” Pulling free from his brother’s grip, Loki pushes to his bare feet, pads away. “And if you do not watch your step, you might never be king.”

“He can’t renounce me when he’s declared me!” he snaps back, and Loki pauses on the cusp of the chamber’s deeper shadows.

“But he can make it difficult for you.” Turning to one of the great candelabra, with thoughtless skill he begins to light one with after the other with magic rather than the taper that rests unlit in its holder. “Thor, _think_. I know it is difficult for you, but I need you to listen to me.”

He remains on his knees before the fire Loki has kindled, feeling for a moment as if they have slipped back into childhood; he sulks, while his brother moves through the shadows and whispers his wisdom as if only to the wind. “I always listen to you.”

“You hear what you want to hear.”

“You only tell me what you want me to hear.”

There is sudden frustration in Loki too, now; when he turns back to face his brother, illuminated by the candles all around him, he raises his hands and shakes his head. “Thor, as far as anyone is concerned, I am your brother. What are you planning to do, tell them I am to be your consort and your _queen_?”

“My equal,” he counters, fingertips digging into the thick reinforced material of his trousers. “As deserving of the throne as I am.”

“But this isn’t about me.” With the easy speed of a warhorse set to charge, Loki returns to him; long fingers clasp his wrists and pull him upright before he can even think to protest. “This is about you, _brother_ mine. And therefore, you will do this alone, and I will stand, and I will watch.”

“Loki—”

But he is already dragging him towards the light, to the table at its heart. “Sit down. Take a cup of wine with me.”

And of course he has already arranged the table, knowing how this evening would go. As Thor moves Loki moves faster, bending to the task of a servant over Thor’s goblet with easy accepting grace. Thor all but snatches the carafe from him, the deep scarlet of the wine running between his fingers to splash ungraciously upon the gold-veined marble of his bedchamber floor. Loki just watches, firelight flickering across his ivory-pale skin like untempered magic of a world not his own.

And he feels a fool. With a great sigh he fills the two goblets, glass blown into fanciful shape and veined in blue and red: gifts from Loki, many a name day ago. For all his frustration, he will not break even a one. Slumping into his chair he stares into the goblet as if divining a future. Then he closes his eyes, thinks that such things are what got them into all this to begin with.

His next words are both sudden and strained. “Loki, might I ask you something?”

“I’m sure you will no matter what I say.” As Thor watches he waters his own wine; the liquid’s crimson colour is thinned, brimming dreadfully close to the worked edges of the glass as he raises it as if in toast. Loki takes a small sip while his eyes never leave his, a half-smile like the setting sun upon his lips. “ _Heir_.”

Teasing though it is, it makes him wince. It also does not make his next words the slightest bit easier to force beyond numbed lips. “I was speaking to Sif earlier.”

“Ah, yes.” Having apparently lost all interest in his wine, Loki sets the glass down and curls his lips higher. “Did she finally speak to you of what she saw?”

“Yes. And no.” Thor leaves his own glass to the table as he pushes a hand back through his hair. “She was concerned about the spell.”

Any and all amusement flees, his words the sharp whipcrack of demand. “What _spell_?”

The force of it makes him retreat, though his place in the chair does not allow him to go far, Loki’s eyes fixed and ready upon him. “She called it a binding spell.”

The pursed mouth tightens further – then, he turns away, profile wrought in golden light of the constant fire in his brother’s hearth. “In Vanaheimr,” he mutters, and when he turns back no vulnerability remains, only deep irritation. “I know she is a woman and I am not, but do remember that _I_ am the trained sorcerer whereas she rejected that path before she’d stumbled more than half a league in those ill-fitting shoes.”

“She said as much herself.” He does not even know exactly why he pursues this path, given Loki’s clear reluctance to allow it. Still the words come. “But she…recognised something, in the spell.”

“It does not mean she understands what she felt.”

“What is a binding spell?”

Caught too quick to hide, Loki’s eyes widen. A moment later returned control narrows them to slits. “It was not intentional.”

“What have you done?”

In the face of Thor’s rising voice Loki’s own fury flares bright, more than a match to his own. “Considering _I_ am the one with child, one would think I suffer more by it!” he snaps, and Thor’s confusion once again reigns true.

“The child…what has our child to do with this binding spell?”

Loki rubs a hand over his forehead, long-fingered and weary. “Come, Thor, you did not truly think yourself so virile that by mounting me only once, you would get me in pup?”

“I wish you wouldn’t word it so.” Irritation crawls over his skin, turning his voice harsh once more. “I didn’t _mount_ you. I wanted to do anything _but_.”

With the weight of Loki’s stare upon him, Thor casts them both back to how it had been in the Vanir seiðmaðr’s circular hall. They’d have had him take his brother like a dog, on his hands and his knees, both princes cleaved utterly to their will. But Thor had not allowed it. Instead he had chosen his own way, his own path – and he had asked his brother to walk it with him, rather than just dragging him along the way he had on so many adventures as children.

It stirs his body now, that memory of how Loki had looked when he had brought him around so they might join together with their eyes upon one another. There had been surprise there, of course – but he’d felt as much himself, given that beneath it had been a naked look of yearning he’d never seen before upon Loki’s face. Thor has always loved his brother, though until that moment he’d never thought of it in such terms before. He’d thought Loki much the same.

But there’s a strange fluttering creature behind his chest now, like a caged bird roused from sleep only to discover it has never been free. When Loki had spoken of the love between them on the day they had been told of Loki’s Jötunn heritage, in all bitterness he had said Thor’s affection had come about only as a result of the bond. His own had not. Then, Thor had just thought it hurt and shock speaking for his brother before he could think. Now, he begins to wonder.

_How long has he wanted this?_

“Loki—”

Already he has pulled just out of his reach. “The child was conceived then because it was meant to be this way,” he says, and already his hand curves instinctively about the place which will one day swell with the life of which he speaks. “And that occurred as part of the binding spell which Sif so clumsily recognised, yes.”

“But then…I always assumed it was thanks to the magic. I’ve never sired another child.”

“That you know of.” Then his eyes widen and his lips work, as if trying to coax the air into giving the words back. “…that was unfair.”

“Are you jealous?” he asks, almost curious, and is met by Loki’s scorn.

“Don’t be absurd.”

But as his eyes drop, Thor cannot help but think back on the women he has known. Loki had been resentful of most – if not all – of them, but then he always behaves so when he thinks Thor’s attention has been drawn elsewhere. In those days Thor had just thought it the lot of the younger brother, left only with frustration given he was too young himself to yet experience such delights for himself.

 The only time he had ever truly concerned himself over Loki’s irritation had been with Sif – the only woman ever to be there before the physical consummation, and the only one to remain long after. He wonders suddenly if that explains her hair. But when he thinks back now, Loki had done that before he’d ever bedded Sif. In fact, it had been the long dark hair that had drawn Thor closer to her, had made him curious to see how it would look spread out across the white sheets of his bed.

Perhaps Loki is not the only one who had known something of this desire before the Vanir seiðmaðr had made it obvious; when Loki speaks now, it is as if he has plucked the words from Thor mind like flowers from the high meadow.

“Yes, a binding spell worked itself during our joining, Thor. That is how the child was conceived, and in that it binds us ever closer together as per the prophecy they understood no more than I did.” When he stops it is to sigh, his shoulders slumping forward as his dark head lowers. “But the bond’s basic tapestry was worked long before now. This is just a new thread added to its weave.”

In light of his brother’s growing misery, Thor reaches forward, around the table between them. “I don’t mean to sound as if I do not trust you.” His fingers curve about his brother’s neck, the tip of his index finger working softly into the hollow just below his ear, at the corner of his jaw. “I just…this is not what I know. And in this war, I cannot help but feel it a disadvantage.”

“It will not be.” Though his face moves up, his eyes are closed; he still leans deeper into Thor’s easy touch. “For I will be with you, brother.”

“Always?”

When his eyes open, they are the rich evergreen of the forests of Asgard herself. “ _Always_.”

“Stay with me tonight.” Roughly given, such an invitation would likely not be sweetened by even Kvasir’s strongest mead. Thor does not care, simply pulls both brother and chair closer so he might bury his face in his neck. “I don’t wish to be alone.”

“A king is always a man alone.”

“I am a _god_ ,” Thor mutters, even as Loki begins to carefully pluck his fingers free of the fists they have made in his hair. “And I am your king. Dare you defy me in this?”

“Thor, honestly.” Like quicksilver Loki works himself through his brother’s hands, drawing back with a grin that might have been wrought of laughter or of tears. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

“Do what?”

In the face of his sullenness, Loki this time laughs outright. “Lie.”

“You are saying I am not a worthy king?”

“I am saying that it does not mean what you think it means.” Rising, Loki pulls himself completely free of his brother’s grip and shakes his head. “Go. Sleep. I will see you in the morning.”

“Loki.” His hand is harsh, perhaps will leave a manacle of bruises about his brother’s wrists – but his singular words are soft, pleas to uncaring god. “ _Please_.”

The kiss he grants, for all it is lingering and longing, cannot last forever. “I will wait for you,” he whispers against his lips, then straightens once more. And so it is Thor who is left waiting as his brother turns and then disappears into the darkness that will guide him back to his own silent chambers.

 

*****

 

The great throne hall stands empty where but mere hours ago it had been filled with the shouts and wonder of great ceremony. It is much of a blur to him now, for all once it had been the only thing in the world he wanted more than the pleasure of wars fought and won. For what could be better than to be the king riding forth at the head of his people, bringing glory to all the realms?

Yet when Thor had ascended to the dais just below the steps leading to the throne itself, it had felt as if a crushing weight had come down upon his shoulders. Broad and brawn though they are, he might have staggered had the eyes of the entire realm not forced him upright while he had wordlessly accepted Gungnir from the outstretched hand of his father. Then, he had turned to find the the court arrayed before him, and with them what felt to be all of Asgard turned out to see the golden prince anointed as their future king.

Thor himself had been blinded. He hadn’t even _felt_ anything, save for a dreadful sensation of falling. Then his face had turned, downward and to his right as if a voice had called – as if a single voice could be heard over such a din. But he had heard it, for there he had been: garbed in full ceremonial dress with light glinting from the curved horns and no smile upon his face. In that, Thor had thought Loki looked more a king than he himself, surely: his face had been a transparent mask, grave and noble and true. Thor knew by contrast he must have been slack jawed and wondering, a confused child set upon his father’s chair and told to smile for the jostling crowd gathering closer with each suffocating second.

But then Loki had smiled. It had been only small, a tiny secret…and one meant for him alone. It had been enough. Thor had turned back to his people and raised Gungnir in one hand, Mjölnir in the other, and felt their roar wind about him like storm and lightning. In that moment he had not truly been Thor. He had been the King. Asgard was his – and he, theirs.

All is gone now, both in person and in the pageant of his ascension. What guards remain are distant and few in number; they walk the perimeter beyond the great columns, mere shadows against the shining night spread across the sky. This evening it is hung with aurorae pierced by the wax and wane of other planets, the great constellations alight with life and purpose. Thor forgets the names of them often. In childhood he had spent so many of those long night lessons half-drowsing in the long grass. Loki had always learned. Loki never forgets. And that’s why Thor had so willingly let it go, even before he had thought to catch hold. Even then he had known his brother would know such things for him, and that it would be always enough.

The feast following his coronation is now dispersed after many hours of tales and mead, though Loki had excused himself early on. Thor had caught his sleeve, had worn his hurt in his eyes for all to see, and not cared. Loki had merely bowed his head, subject to his lord, and had spoken low of a summoning from Heimdall.

A brief murmur had passed around the table, at that. Then, as Loki had taken his leave, it had been just as quickly let go. Tomorrow will be the day for war; tonight, the Aesir had much preferred to drink to the health of their shining brilliant prince-who-will-be-king, the one who will lead them to war and back, drenched both in glory and the blood of their enemies.

As Thor approaches the dais for the second time this day, now in silence and in shadow, he is not sure how he had known to seek him here. With each step he considers the binding; perhaps there is something in that he cannot yet understand. It doesn’t seem to work when he actually thinks about it, but otherwise…it is a constant quiet sense. It is a _knowing_. Thor wants his brother, and when he descends into the great open space before the throne he sees him there and it is no surprise, at all.

“Loki?”

“Thor.”

Summoned even though he is, he does not turn. Instead Loki remains where he stands, silent and steady at the foot of the higher stairs that lead to the dais upon which Hliðskjálf rests above the world that gathers at its golden feet. Thor has never sat in it himself – not even today had he done so, for the Allfather is still king. When he falls to his sleep, as soon he must, then Thor will take his promised place.

 Without Gungnir to hand to enable the worlds to be Seen, it is more ceremonial than the true seat of the King of Asgard. Yet in this light, it seems different to how it had been in the warmth of the day. Now, it waits like a living creature, breathing and still in its almost-full circle, golden and dull-glinting in the lowlight.

Though they are not truly alone, the Einherjar who remain feel as distant as all other realms as Thor draws closer to his brother. Though he moves easy each step seems to echo with the weight of fate itself as he comes to the foot of the lower stairs. Still Loki does not move upon the landing between. His eyes remain fixed upon the empty seat, back ramrod straight, light glinting from the arch of his horns like the curve of the Bifröst reaching between realms in glittering solid promise.

“I thought you said you had no wish to take the throne.”

His answering chuckle is as light as the thin sharp iron of his throwing knives. “So little trust you have in me, brother.”

“Do not twist my words.” There’s a rough edge to that as he pauses in his coming. “That is not what I meant, at all.”

“I know it.” Still, he does not turn. As if hypnotised Loki cannot look away from the throne and its wide-open seat. Thor remains at the level of a supplicant, Loki at the level of pronouncement where the king descends to speak when not seated.

And as he stares, Thor recalls the half-formed thoughts of before, when Loki had left the banqueting hall so very early. Somehow it is strange to see Loki in full ceremonial garb – both now, and always. For all it is bright armour, hard and unyielding, it does not make him appear stronger. Something about it instead makes him seem more brittle, something to be more easily broken. The curve of his great horns, heavy upon his head, serve only to bow his back, to hunch him over when he does not force himself upright; their weight, real and imagined, takes from him the easy confidence he otherwise wears. Is it because in green and gold he must be seen, Thor wonders, whereas otherwise he stands in the shadows? And for all he has spoken bitterly of the cold of that darkness to Thor it seems he has always been more comfortable there: the watchful advisor, his warrior side held wilful hostage to the far superior strength of his mind and seiðr.

But as he looks up to his brother in his glittering image of war and battle-won glory, Thor shifts his weight from one foot to the other. His skin feels charged, uncomfortable beneath the weight of his own armour. They are alone, and knowledge of that only makes it worse. Much as he would wish to shout the truth of his devotion to Loki from the very spires of the palace, in this moment he wishes no one else to see, no one else to know. This is his, and his alone.

One foot falls upon the bottom stair – and at last Loki turns, looks down, challenge writ clear upon the pale fine features at once so familiar and so utterly strange in this new configuration of their ever-changing lives.

“What are you doing?”

And Thor cocks an eyebrow, the playful beginnings of a challenge of his own. “Do you not wish for me to join you?”

From his higher ground Loki looks down upon him with the haughty presence of a prince born and bred to the golden realm. The smooth curve of his helm reflects the upward tilt of his chin, with watchful eyes half-lidded and dilated in the dim light. Loki has said he wishes not to be a king. But in this moment, in this position, he is the master; his lips pause in promise, slightly parted on a word, on a smirk. The tilt of his head leaves the shadow of his horns stark against the walls even in the gentle firelight of the chamber empty of all else but the sons of Odin.

“Do you wish to join me, Thor?” The tip of his tongue moves in glib invitation across the swell of his lower lip, mouth quirking upward as if mouthing an unspoken and obscene answer of his own. “Or would you much rather join _with_ me?”

And now his skin is afire, crawling beneath the silvered weight of his star-iron armour. “What are you suggesting?”

“Oh, Thor. Do open your mind.” His laughter is low, half a whisper even as it seems shouted into every aching yearning corner of said mind. “What do you _think_ I am suggesting?”

It is obscene, this proposal. But they are alone. And between them, there is nothing that is wrong. This is how they are. This is _what_ they are. And Thor places another foot, takes another step upward – and already Loki is dipping his head, leaning forward in wordless provocation, his horns the widening curve of temptation as long fingers pulse in challenge at his sides.

“Do you not wish to sit upon your own throne?” A hand moves up, finger pressed to lips in thoughtful consideration; it only draws Thor’s attention to the manner in which his chest rises and falls with quickening breath. Then his eyes dip lower to the enticing tilt of hips as one leg cants outward from the knee just enough, just so Thor might see the burgeoning swell between his legs. Then Loki is laughing again, silvered voice resounded like lewd song from the golden walls of Asgard’s deepest centre as he leans forward, a hand damp from his own lips extended in invitation. “Oh, _do_ let me show you what you want, brother mine.”

And he feels blinded as he reaches forward, takes that hand, is led ever forward – and then Loki’s lips are on his and he tastes of winterfire. Everything of that is sweet and pure and cold, but the heat engendered in him is blazing, all-consuming, and standing with Loki before the Allfather’s throne all Thor wants to do is _burn_.

“They will see.”

“People see what they want to see,” Loki whispers against his lips, the soft press of his tongue followed by the sharp nip of his teeth. “Much as they hear what they want to hear. Do not worry yourself, brother mine, none shall see nor hear us up here where we belong.”

A small, sensible voice murmurs something about how this is more wish than promise, but it is another quandary that bothers Thor deeper. He wishes to run his hands through Loki’s hair, but there is something about him in this way: the helmet over the delicate curve of his skull, the hard arched length of the horns. Thor raises a hand, finds one smooth and long beneath his palm as it moves up and away only to return. In that, it reminds him of an ouroboros. But there are points, to these broken circles; he catches a finger, draws blood, and smiles all the same.

“Thor.” Loki croons his name, steps forward so that his brother must drop his hand to his throat, must look nowhere else but into his eyes. “Thor, this isn’t enough.”

It rocks a shiver through him, that voice. He _knows_ that voice. It is low, cajoling; it is the voice of a confidant and fellow conspirator, of the one that all through childhood and adolescence and long into adulthood has talked him into adventures and plots and madcap schemes and now that head is tilting as the clever tongue traces along his lip and he is laughing still.

“The throne, brother?” One of the low braziers blazes upward, just for a moment, and Loki eyes are alight with red and orange and deep golden-green glow. “Will you sit in it now?” he whispers, and now they are green again, coy and sly. “For me, perhaps?”

He moves forward, and then they move as one; with Loki’s hand about his Thor comes to his throne. His skin is cool and yet blazing heat as they ascend. It is a confirmation, if only between themselves, and shadows dancing upon the wall, joined and twisting together. But he stops one step below, encourages him up. At his peak Thor hesitates, looks back. Loki only nods.

“This is your place.”

“And yours?”

“I know mine.” He spreads his palms. “Sit. My brother. My beloved.” And his voice lowers though his eyes blaze with a light that seems to scream through his soul. “My king.”

And he does. Resting there now, he knows it is like no other feeling he has ever had – and no other feeling he ever will again. Without Gungnir to hand it is just a seat, though it remains a throne. _His_ throne.

It is nothing he has ever dared before. Even as children, Loki had not provoked him so far. Instead they had challenged each other, urging one another to go _just one step closer_. Then through the laughter and quickening nervous breaths there had been fingers stroked across an arm before dancing back, half in fear of retribution, half in elation at a glory stolen from the maws of defeat.

Loki stands before him now and has not yet touched it himself. Perhaps that means that he has lost one of their oldest games after all. But to Thor’s mind it seems somehow that his brother has won for he stands tall and lean and proud in his shining armour. One hand rises to first one shoulder, and then the other. A moment later his greatcloak puddles at his feet, and then his hands move to the cradle of his helm.

“No.”

Again, that teasing arch of a dark eyebrow. “ _No_?”

“Leave…” He must clear his throat to speak, voice stolen by the hoarse onset of lust. “…I like it.”

“You like it?” One hand rests upon a thrust-out hip now, lips curled with ironic challenge. “I thought you said it made me look like a cow.”

“I like cows.”

The shadowed solemnity of the moment is broken by a sudden huff of incredulous laughter. Then, his lips curl upward, head and shoulders dipping in that sensuous sinuous movement of a snake curving curious about its prey. “Ah…so it seems not even kingship can turn your words to gold.”

“I prefer yours,” he says with rough desire, “silver and sweet.”

“Ooh, that was a nice try there, brother mine,” he says, and almost sounds as though he means it. “But you should leave the words to me, tonight.”

It is unfair – because there are _no_ words when Loki uses his seiðr to dissolve all of his armour as if it were nothing more than the air between them. In that Thor almost feels cheated; he would have preferred the slow tease of leather over pale skin, revealing the prize beneath in careful slow strokes of those long fingers, working at buckle and tie and button.

But Loki is nude before him now, smooth and pale and limned in firelight, his head a corona of gold with arching horns strong and true and his eyes dancing green aurorae. He cannot regret that. Thor will never regret this night.

And then Loki goes to one knee, fist pressed to heart.

“No,” Thor says, hoarse. “ _No_.”

When he glances up, for all his gravity Loki has allowed into his eyes a glint of puzzled query. “No?”

“Come to me.” One hand reaches forward, almost clumsy in its miscalculated speed. Yet the power and the purpose of his command cannot be denied. “ _Now_.”

“Oh,” he says, playful, and only Loki would prolong such a game when Thor has already thrown in everything of himself as the stake, “tell me, is that the order of my king?”

“It is the order of your slave.”

The brilliance of his smile would have shamed the dawn herself. Loki steps forward, _leans_ forward, and then arms come to rest in draped lazy curves about his neck. One knee comes up, lean thigh leading like an arrow to the heat of where his legs meet; then the other joins it and Loki is upon the throne. Rising above him, over him, his brother presses a kiss to forehead, one eye, then its matched pair – then, finally, his lips.

“Might I sit here with you?” he wonders, voice a teasing purr born from the low centre of his chest; Thor draws a hoarse hitching breath.

“It’s a bit late now, to be asking.”

The laughter bubbles up from low in his throat like the waters of Mímir, threatening wisdom and madness both. “And here I thought you named me the master.”

“You’ve mastered me.”

“Again, no,” Loki says, and licks his tongue across Thor’s lips as if he might taste the mead of Kvasir’s verse and skill upon them. “No poetry. No _words_.”

Instead there are just hands – his own hands, moving up Loki’s slender sides in mirrored movements both easy and familiar. Long before this evolution of their relationship, had known his brother’s body almost as well his own. But then, he knows now, there remains still so much more to discover about Loki Odinson.

And back then Thor had not known _this_ , the pure pleasure and beauty of being able to touch what Loki would not easily give to anyone else. The noises it engenders leave him dizzied, almost drunk upon his own power. Thor is no musician; for all his body obeys him in the war-song of battle, his fingers have been ever-clumsy over string and key and stretched leather. Even his ever-hopeful mother had long abandoned the hope of Thor’s acquiring musicianship. Somewhat to his surprise, and secret gladness, Loki had never proved adept either. He had been the more skilled, certainly, but it had been a kind of practical and practised magic. There had never come the easy mastery of one born to such gifts.

But when Loki is the instrument for him to play, Thor needs no tutor save the response his touch wrings forth from the bared throat. There comes hitching breath as a finger traces the dip between two ribs; a palm pressed to the small of his back brings forth a heated gasp; when lips caress collarbone and then press to the pulse of his throat, Thor can feel it leaping like a baby bird’s heartbeat to match a stuttered moan. Yet it is the soft rise and fall of hips that tell him most. His own cock strains against the binding of his trousers, shifting, calling; as Thor conducts a symphony across every inch of his brother’s bare skin he in turn is desperate for the touch of those long fingers upon him. Yet now they tangle in his hair, anchoring, holding him steady, giving him purchase.

Then there is the grind of Loki’s cock against Thor’s abdomen, leaving a glimmer of pre-come upon the roundels of his armour. Without thought one hand moves, comes about to clasp tight about Loki’s cock. It burns hot in his hand, though it is nothing compared to the heat of his own blood when Loki’s entire body arcs inward with the strength of his gasp.

And Thor can imagine this no other way, cannot understand why they have not _always_ been this way. They are brothers, they forever will be brothers, but it is more than that. They are eternal. They are gods. They are one and the same and they together are upon the throne of Asgard and from here they can see the universe.

His hand moves about the anchor of Loki’s neck. Like the press of a blade to split a throat it is skilled and quick; the smooth motion draws only a full body shudder and no blood. The pad of his thumb presses against his lips, dips inside. As he sucks upon it, Loki watches him from the half-lidded green haze of his eyes. Then he sucks harder, and Thor gasps. A moment later he takes his vengeance and tugs on his brother’s cock, smiling in triumph as Loki bucks upward with involuntary loss of restraint. But he laughs still, white teeth like the bared fangs of a loosed wolf.

While one hand steadies himself upon Thor’s shoulder, Loki reaches down with the other; there’s a brief moment of distraction with a swirl of a tongue, the flicker of cold against the beat of his pulse. They are careful and knowing, those clever fingers that work just far enough into his armour to release him, to ease him free: then he holds it, just briefly, this aching length of him. A moment later he lets go, smile the silver promise of a star-riddled sky.

Thor expects those fingers to then guide him down to where Loki awaits his entrance as they always have before. But he does not. As if from nowhere, an unguent jar appears in Loki’s palm; uncapped, Thor can almost taste the scent of Iðunn’s apples, life eternal in each bite.

Even in this moment he cannot help but raise an eyebrow. “Tricks, brother?”

“The ones you like best, of course.” Fingers trail deep groves in the cool softness, then: they press into his own body. Everything about the motion of Loki’s preparation of his body for his brother’s entrance is heady, tart and yet sweet; it leaves Thor’s long-since roused appetite desperate for satiation. Sensing his need Loki leans close, breath ghosting in a chuckle across his brother’s cheek as his fingers angle to just the right spot. This close Thor can feel the beat of Loki’s heart like thunder beneath his skin – and that has always been _his_ element, _his_ force, _his_ power, and now it is in his brother and then Loki sighs and lowers and Thor is himself deep within him and the thunder skips and gathers strength and beats harder and he is _home_.

Of course he cannot be content for long. The storm is rising, and Thor rises with it, bucking his hips up and deeper. Loki is almost unbalanced by it, leaning upon one arm of the throne to catch himself from falling. At first there are no words, just a surprised huff of breath – then, naturally, comes a low and long laugh. “Impatient, aren’t we?”

“Why wait?” And Thor has no time to dissemble, not with his brother nude and needing upon him, his own desire a roiling mass of breaking stormcloud. “Why deny ourselves what is ours?”

“Ah, and shall we try to remember whose idea this was?”

“But you tried to make me believe it was mine.” One hand closes tight enough about a hip to bruise, and he jerks up again so that Loki gives an entirely undignified whine of surprised desire. “Hoist by your own petard, Loki.”

And already he’s clawing back his dignity, righting himself, twisting his lips in dark sly humour. “Exactly as planned,” he murmurs back, pupils dilated and his hands splayed across the wide arms of the throne. Then he is rising, then he is falling, and Thor leans back and lets Loki do what he wants.

But then, he pauses. Thor opens his eyes, looks up with a frown. And of course Loki smiles still.

“You know, Thor,” he says, breathless and thoughtful as he twists his hips just a little, just _enough_ , “this is more comfortable than I ever could have imagined.”

With his mind and body disordered both by the debauched creature writhing above him, it is a long moment before Thor can speak with words and not gasping choked breath. “You like the thought of sitting on the throne after all?”

“Only if you are on it first.” Again, he goes deeper, and his eyes widen to match the curved _o_ of his mouth as he seats Thor exactly where he wants him. Then he chuckles, looks down, and that too-clever mouth widens into a smile that threatens to take them both down together as he gently adds: “And only if I get to sit on your cock to do so.”

His vision blurs. A moment ago it would have seemed impossible to him, to be any harder than he already is. But it is possible, it is happening, and Loki’s laughter is low and lilting.

“But perhaps this is just the way of such things.” Again he leans forward, lips whisper-soft against the hollow of his ear. “Perhaps we are not the first to do such things. Perhaps this is where you were given life, so that you would always be king upon the throne where those who came before gave you this very life.”

“Loki!” Thor half-chokes on the unwelcome image, rearing back. “Stop that!”

And still Loki _laughs_ , wild in the half-light with his head thrown back to expose the long lean line of his throat. The narrow chest heaves with mirth and rising passion and his cock is proud, erect. And the angle is just right, he leans back just so Thor might see the shadows where his own member disappears into the clenching heat of his brother’s yielding body and he wants to bury his face in his hands; he will never stop falling for his brother’s words and tricks. Instead, he just jerks upward, buries his own cock deeper. Loki jerks, gasps, laughter stuttering to a halt. When he looks down at Thor, hazed with lust, he lets out a shuddering breath.

“You…”

“This is the only way I want the throne.” His hands press against Thor’s cheeks, sudden and strong, his words fierce as he presses their foreheads together. “With you.”

“Me, you have.”

“And the throne, have you.” Again he fits their lips together. It is awkward, with the helmet in place. But Thor will not discard it, again tracing the curve of one horn. And though Loki could not possibly feel it, from the low keen torn from his throat, it is as if Thor had done the same to his cock.

Again he leans back, moving and rocking like a boat upon the sea that floats upon the sky and holds Asgard aloft amongst the stars. Loki is alight in both his pale skin and his gleaming helm. Alive, perfect, pure elemental force – and Thor remembers Vanaheimr, of how they had moved together first, their power melding together. There’s a strangeness, in that; he rarely thinks of Vanaheimr when they are together like this. It had all begun there, but Thor thinks it means more than that; fate has led them to this, but they walked the path themselves.

Then Loki squeezes around him. With a half-strangled gasp Thor lurches forward, would have unseated him if not for the tightening of hands on his narrow waist and forehead upon his chest as he spills deep inside his brother. He looks up from beneath sweat-stranded hair, sudden guilt -- but with it comes laughter, light and easy, as Loki continues to move atop of him. It does not last long; a moment later Loki’s release spills between them, warm familiarity upon his heated skin, even though so little of it has been bared.

Then Loki is rising up, lifting himself free. The manner in which he moves backward, tilting downward, twists low in Thor’s abdomen; it is as if Loki intends again to go to his knees. Everything about the movement is perfect grace until Thor sits up and forward; Loki then gives an undignified shriek as his brother hauls him upon his lap, feet flung unceremoniously over one side of the throne they have shared once, and will forever again.

“ _Thor_!”

“It’s lonely up here, all by myself,” he counters, as though a king ever ought to deign to be questioned. _But then you always question me_ , his mind whispers as his other hand closes with firm familiarity upon Loki’s neck. Smiling, he then presses a light lazy kiss to his lips. “Stay with me.”

“I should hardly think you’ve given me much of a choice.” For all his grumbling, Loki doesn’t seem bothered by this new configuration. Instead he remains still, the rise and fall of his chest moving from a high irregular pattern to one much shallower, more even. Aside from that there is only silence, as easy and golden as the flickering light of the empty throne room.

One arm is slung about Loki’s shoulders, its hand resting at the level of his ribcage. The other he moves from his neck now, where he can feel the damp hair just beneath the smooth cradling lines of his helm. Loki gives him a languid little smile as he trails those fingers over the hard swell of his collarbone, curving about his heart while the thumb flicks absently at the nipple. Still, it begins to fade as one finger dips into his navel before the entire palm comes to cradling rest over his flat abdomen. When he looks up Loki is watchful, almost curious.

“You can feel him.” But even for Thor, it is not really a question. Giving no immediate answer Loki stretches instead, then retracts; he seems so very like a cat, coiled around his brother like a tail about a warm body.

“Yes,” Loki says finally, low. “I can feel him.”

“I cannot.”

“You lack the sight.” One of his hands moves, the long fingers coming to rest upon Thor’s own; his words are not the easy patronising tone of years past, but rather more plainly thoughtful as his gaze searches his. “…although not the eyes. You could see, if you wished it.”

“Could you show me?”

“Perhaps.” When he yawns, he raises that hand and presses it lightly over his mouth. “I am very tired.”

“Only perhaps?” His own smile is a half-formed, crooked thing. “How unlike you, to not know how to do something.”

“Oh, Thor, you can’t use my own tricks against me. Especially in not so clumsy a fashion.” Wrapping both arms about his neck, he leans close to whisper in one ear: “Take me to bed, I haven’t the energy for anything else.”

“What, are you suggesting I carry you like a ravished bride through the halls?” A strange kind of satisfaction shivers through him at the mental image of that: he in his armour still and in his arms his brother, nude and languid with the horns upon his head. Loki seems to sense some of that, for he raises an eyebrow in mock disapproval.

“I suggest no such thing.”

“Then how do you propose I take you back to your bed?”

“ _Your_ bed,” he corrects, “and yes, I suppose I must do all the work.” With an ironically tilted eyebrow Thor recognises from many a childhood argument, Loki rises to his feet and leaves Thor to his throne as he moves to collect his discarded armour. He dons only the trousers before beckoning to Thor, who has only just set his own flies to rights. With a casual flick of his hands Loki passes his seiðr over the throne, wiping it clean of all evidence of what had passed there. Thor almost feels deep regret, but then Loki’s hand closes over his and they are but a moment later alone in his chambers.

The instantaneous movement disorients him; Loki cannot do it over great distances, particularly those beyond the palace, and only rarely will take along another along for the ride. But as his armour clatters to the floor and he presses fierce hands to his face, one hand then fisting in his hair, Thor sways beneath him and then falls back upon the bed. In the end, he can deny Loki nothing.

They should sleep, and this is something they both know. The coming day will bring with its dawning both war council and conference, every waking moment ringing with a call to arms. But Thor cannot resist Loki, not with the helm now discarded and his hair sweaty and disarrayed about his languid features.

Against the great headboard of his bed, carved true and telling with the creatures and heroes of a thousand legends and more known since childhood, Thor takes Loki slow. With each thrust he is pressed deeper into swaddling furs, legs tight and taut about his waist; yet from the knowing gleam in Loki’s eyes, Thor feels as though he is the one being taken, held tight, never to be let go. In this, Thor is certain he will not ever be merely and only himself ever again.

And as he comes, and as Loki rises to meet him, he cannot see how he ever thought it might ever be any other way.

Thor rises from the bed, pads into the bathchambers to retrieve damp and dry towels. There’s something strangely soothing about the action of guiding first one then the other over Loki’s pale skin, for all Loki has proved more than once that his magics are suited to such tasks. It had cleansed the throne after all—

“You know,” Thor says, sudden and stilled, “I always believed the throne warded against all magic but that of the king.”

“Very good, Thor, you actually did listen to a lesson or two.”

The lazy reply does nothing to calm the sudden staccato beat of his heart. “Loki…”

And certainly the growing sharp curve of his smile is only making it worse.

“ _Loki_.”

“Oh, come now – you enjoyed it, Thor.” Like a water spirit summoned from the depths Loki rises from the bed, takes up a towel of his own; his eyes are mischief managed as he looks up with innocent calm from beneath those long dark lashes. “You shouldn’t be ashamed of that.”

Allowing himself to be pressed back, Thor keeps what few words he can think enough to form to himself, stares instead at the canopy above while Loki hums a light song and goes about his work. He should be angry, or at least irritated. But they might as well have been alone, for all the guards that might have seen them thus at such an hour. And then, had it not been worth it, to sit upon the throne with his brother the way they ought to have been permitted to before all the court—

“Do not fret so, Thor.” Loki presses a kiss to his lips, long and lingering. When he pulls back, his expression is both wry and fond. “It puts lines upon your face. They do not suit you.”

“I am not ashamed of you,” he says, brow still creased. “But…what you risk…”

“People see what they want to see, Thor.” And there is a curve to his lips now like that of a blooded blade. “I do not imagine they wanted to see that.”

His lips tighten. “I am not ashamed,” he repeats, and Loki’s smile lightens, easing dawn.

“And neither I of my feelings for you.” His kiss is dry against the pulse of his heart. “My king.”

There’s something peculiar in that, Thor thinks. Yet exhaustion seeks to claim him, sleep beckons, and he should give in; sleep is not to be something they will easily find in days to come. Already his eyes close without thought, though his body flares awake beneath the weight of Loki’s trailing fingers.

 “If you want peace,” Loki murmurs, fingers now upon his anointed brow, “you must prepare for war.”

“You might think it odd of me,” Thor whispers into the dark, “but I have no wish to speak of war this night.”

“Yes.”

The affirmation is so soft Thor barely hears it; his frown is half-stolen by his descent into sleep. “…yes?”

“Oh, yes.” First his lips press to each closed lid, each to each; only then does he whisper soft upon his stilled lips: “…because tomorrow, brother mine, is when the war begins.”


	5. Shall I At Least Set My Lands In Order?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Odin makes his plans while Loki does what he wants -- and Thor has no idea what he himself needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the despair continues -- although I eventually came to the conclusion this week that these first five chapters make up a kind of "honeymoon" period in the story, and I swear to Cthulhu that in chapter six something like an actual _plot_ is about to turn up to the party. It's going to be drunk and late and probably quite belligerent, not to mention I have no idea what said plot is actually going to BRING to said party, but...I get points for trying, yes?
> 
> ... _yes_?
> 
> [sounds of crickets]
> 
> Well, _shit_.

He so very rarely has nightmares that at first Thor does not even realise he is in one. Instead there just comes the sensation of darkness, somehow both familiar and unpleasant upon damp skin. Were he not standing he could be simply wakening from sleep, drowsing in the deep darkness of the secret hours of morning before dawn.

Then, he sees it – the place upon whose edge he stands wreathed in shadow. It is not his bedchamber, nor even Loki’s. And his stomach twists as recognition cuts deep. Six figures stand arrayed about the starburst centre, and two more are at the dais at its centre. Thor knows now why he recognises this place, even in the stifling darkness and greasy smoke of candles as thick as his arm. Yet for all their size the light is dim, almost as unnatural as the darkness itself in this cursed chamber.

All pale shadow, Loki is motionless in his white skin, eyes glittering like broken mirrors as he is forced to rest upon his knees. Thor cannot hear what is said, not in words; the All-tongue does not seem to stretch as far as dreams. But given the look on Loki’s face he is not sure he wants to hear. He is not sure he needs to. The killing rage is already rising, for while Loki’s face is still and serene Thor knows him well enough to recognise the tiny twitch of any eye that is the only crack in his façade as the spell’s words croon about him. His brother is afraid.

But Thor cannot move. He can be little more than a worthless statue as the Vanir seiðmaðr, whose head they had crushed together beneath Mjölnir’s weight, lives again in…memory? Imagination? _What is a dream, truly?_ he thinks, bewilderment twined about fury. _And can only the dreamer walk such corridors?_ The frustrated confusion only grows while his body remains something not his own, because it is not responding to his will even as the Vanir seiðmaðr presses his fingers between Loki’s lips. Though he would rather punch and kick he cannot move; Thor therefore seeks to shout: _bite down, take his fingers, make him bleed and scream!_ No sound emerges and Loki only allows the intrusion. With sick remembrance Thor realises Loki cannot do harm, not here, not when he knows it will only be visited in turn upon those he seeks to protect.

 _But I should be protecting you!_ The words tremble in his throat, stillborn and silent. _You do not need to do this! I am your brother, I am your elder, you should come to me and then we can stand together instead of apart and then all will be well and **you need not do this** , Loki!_

But it is already done. Loki’s forehead is pressed to the runed and chalked ground and his hips are canted upward; he is humbled at the centre of a chanting circle, shadows dancing in rising flame. The scent of the tall candles chokes Thor, all-seeing eyes watering, and it seems so unfair for in every other sense he is not here but he suffers while Loki suffers more and he cannot move as the seiðmaðr takes his brother and bile fills his throat and all he wants to do is scream.

And _kill_. He has not Mjölnir, not in this dream-wrought hall, but as the storm rises he needs her not. With his hands alone he can do what he wants – and Thor wants nothing more than to lay waste to everything in his path, to undam a river of blood and gore with which to drown all who would dare touch his brother in their depths. But all he has is stillness. All he has is silence. Loki, too, remains voiceless even when the stranger’s hand jerks him to unwelcome climax, and Thor’s throat is raw and bleeding and his palms are worked with deep scores of ragged nails even though no-one hears, and no-one sees.

Then Loki’s head turns, hazed eyes focused suddenly, and Thor realises that someone _has_ heard, that someone knows his pain.

And it is no better, because Thor now sees the depth of Loki’s own pain and yet still can do not a thing about it.

 

*****

 

Again, when he wakes in the morning Loki is gone. The sweat of the nightmare clings to his skin, and Thor punches a bedpost so hard splinters work beneath the knuckles. Sucking the largest free with a hiss, he goes to the bathchamber and scrubs the bitter memory away. Even as he does he corrects himself – not a memory. _Dream_. It cannot be a memory. Loki has not once spoken to him of Vanaheimr. Thor knows nothing of what truly happened to him there.

 _Brother, we are in this together_.

But Loki is not there to hear him. Resentment roils beneath his skin as he passes his head over the warm uru of Mjölnir’s runed head. Thor knows he can do nothing but go seek him out, and is half-dressed when one of the pages calls from the antechamber that his father wishes to take breakfast with him.

Swallowing back a curse as he goes out, he still gives a curt nod of acknowledgement. Though his brother’s company is his true desire, even the Warriors Three and Sif would be better than his father; just to know that they are safe and hale back amongst Asgard’s dreaming spires would bring him calm after what his mind has gifted him this night. Yet he says nothing of this, accedes to what he knows it not a true request. Thor is both prince and king in name and in reality, and has a realm to lead to war. With such responsibility must inevitably come the lesson of which battles to wage, and which to let lie.

But there is great pleasure, tinged with trepidation though it may be, when he enters the morning-room to find his father seated with Loki to his left hand, both in quiet conversation. For this Thor knows he should be glad. Any peace between Loki and their father, given Odin’s opinion of their child and the lies that have plagued Loki’s life since he had been first brought to Asgard, can only be for the best. Still it can only be tenuous at best, and Thor’s abdomen twists as he steps into the sun-soaked morning chamber. Huginn gives a rough caw that could be greeting, could be insult, and then Loki moves to his feet even as Thor presses his fist to his heart and bows to father and king.

“Thor,” Odin says, grey head inclined in brief acknowledgement. “Be seated.” He then turns, to where his second son remains standing. “Loki.”

But Loki does not take his place, for Thor stands still and stares at him. “Why do you rise for me, brother?”

“You will be my king.”

The easy deference, given entirely without irony, hits Thor right in the memory – the _dream_ – of his brother forced to his knees, forced to give what would have been taken all the same. Stomach churning he takes an uncertain step forward, despite the watchful eye of the Allfather Thor can be nothing but focused entirely upon his brother. “Loki—”

“Thor.” His father’s words are the low authority of their entire lives, and will not be denied. “Be seated.”

Yet still he stands, his silence born more of uncertain phrasing than actual rebellion. For all Loki seems oddly calm in the Allfather’s presence, the fact remains that they still have not truly spoken of what they have decided. “Father—”

“There is a war to be fought,” Odin says, his interruption the heavy swing of a broadsword brought to battle; his hand sweeps in counterpoint to the chair at his right. It is not an invitation. “When that is won, we will speak of what the future will bring.”

Thor has broken his fast often enough in his father’s company to know what comes next. Taking his seat, he stares at the laid-out repast: fresh fish, crusty bread, eggs, thick jam, rich butter churned by hand. Though they had been speaking at his entrance, Loki has since lapsed into silence as he works at removing the seeds from the fruit before him, absently chewing on one as if sustenance was to be only a by-product of his efforts. Odin will break this silence when it suits him, and the brothers know it well. Therefore, though he is no longer hungry, Thor works his way through his plate and waits upon his father’s grace.

But then, Loki has always been so much better at this than he.

“Father—”

And their father has always known him well; when Odin cuts Thor off, he speaks with a conviction that makes it seems he had always intended the conversation to begin at this precise moment. “Thor, you are to accompany the Vanir ambassador to Vanaheimr.”

His elbow jerks so sharply an entire carafe of pulped fruit topples to the floor. “ _What_?”

“It has been sworn upon solemn oath that the King of Vanaheimr knew not of the rebel cells forming across his land,” Odin says, single eye upon Thor both unflinching and unmoving. “I would have you take word of our belief to the King in order secure his alliance in rooting out the factions hidden in his land.”

“I…of course, but—”

“They have invited you and a small company. You will set out tomorrow.”

“I…see.” He doesn’t, and he is sure his father knows as much; yet when he risks a glance sideways, Loki is peaceably continuing his destruction of the fruit for no purpose other than his own amusement, or so it seems to Thor. That hurts, even as he looks back to the Allfather and wonders how he can possibly hope to successfully wield words against Odin when even Loki will not rouse himself to try.

“Father, diplomacy is hardly my strong suit.”

“You will learn.” Odin reaches for a water glass, glint with perspiration, and closes a hand about it as if it were the hilt of a sword. “You are my heir, are you not?”

“I am, I just…well, I suppose as long as I have Loki at my side—”

“Loki will not be accompanying you.”

And again, as he is reduced to single word answers, he must wonder how his father expects this to end. “What?”

“Come, Thor,” and there’s a certain kind of calculated laziness to the first true words he has heard Loki speak this morning, “surely you realise we can’t _both_ be in Vanaheimr’s capital at the same time?”

“Why not?”

Both father and brother press fingertips to temples in an eerily mirrored gesture, and Thor cannot hold back a laugh that is as inappropriate as it is genuine. They both startle, look at him, then to each other. Something unspoken moves between them, sudden and knowing, and for all the precariousness of their situation Thor cannot be anything but glad to know his father and his brother are still that, too.

“Thor, you know what happens when all one’s eggs are placed in the same basket,” Loki says, taking some unheard cue from their father; Thor huffs out a laugh.

“Yes, mostly because you dared me to climb a tree once with one.” Leaning back in his chair in a way that his mother has never managed to break him of, he adds airily: “And it happened to be filled with the eggs of some great bird that then swooped in from the west and tried to peck my eyes out. What did you _think_ was going to happen?”

“I told you to climb a tree with a basket of eggs. Did _you_ never stop to think why in the Norns’ names I would even _want_ you to do that?”

“Enough.” Odin speaks in a fashion mild enough, though his voice had not been made for easy speech. “Thor, your brother is right – you will not take him with you. It is bad enough that circumstances dictate you must go so far even yourself. But we cannot risk outright warfare.”

“Why not? We defeated Vanaheimr once, we could do it again.” Already Loki is lowering his face into his palm in a gesture Thor has known many a time, but still he goes on, the battle-song of ages rousing heart and the blood it pumps through his restless limbs. “And this time I shall be at the head of your armies, Mjölnir singing war-fire and calling down the sky! What have we to fear?”

“Everything.” The heaviness of that word is enough to weigh down even Thor’s enthusiasm, the Allfather’s expression as wearied as it is relentless. “You have never known the true war, Thor. And though I have no doubt that one day you will, I will not have it waged when it is unnecessary. Thus far none of the intelligence we have gathered suggests the rebellion has any true ties to the monarchy, though it cannot be ruled out. Your place now is to go to Vanaheimr’s centre and return, and tell me of what you see.”

Huginn gives a quick caw that cuts through Thor’s head, though he looks nowhere but to his father. “They’re not just going to tell me if I march in there and _ask_. It’s a big hammer, but not that big – or at the very least, it’s not subtle.” His brother makes a choked sound that might very well have been a laugh or a disbelieving snort, but Thor cannot stop. “Father, you know as well as I that _Loki_ should—”

“Loki is not going.”

“I have my own task.”

This mild addition brings Thor’s head around in a sharp half circle. “Like what?”

Loki’s eyebrow is a withering retort in and of itself. “I am accompanying a seiðkona to the oracle site in order to see if she might find something of use to us in what remains.”

His utter serenity is utterly at odds with the red juice staining his fingers as he continues to pull his breakfast to pieces while never taking a single bite. Thor’s fury is swift and the table jerks as he lurches to his feet, a mug upending to spill hot thick broth across the floor. “You will _not_ go there!”

“Thor, you will take your seat.”

“Father!” He spins so fast he actually half-unbalances himself; slamming a palm to the table, his voice roars across the room: “You _cannot_ allow this!”

“I was the one to suggest it.” And the Allfather’s voice is as hard as the ice of Jötunheimr as his lips downturn. “Though do not let my words fool you – for it is not, in fact, a suggestion. _Sit you down_.”

Thor does not wish to, but his body cannot long ignore his father’s command. Sullen, he slumps down, turns his tempered fury upon Loki. But of course his brother merely watches with that still serenity he has learned in a lifetime of silently transcribing arguments between his brother and their father.

“You cannot possibly wish to go back there.”

“This is not a matter of wishes nor desire. It is simply what is necessary.”

In the ensuing silence Odin radiates what cannot be named exactly as approval, though certainly it is not disapproving. Thor listens to the drip of juice upon the floor, and feels his knuckles whiten as he stares at his brother.

“No.”

“Thor, this is not your decision.”

“I don’t care!”

Now Odin speaks, his voice resonant with the authority of his long centuries as the greatest of these realms. “Your brother is not a weakling child to be coddled or hidden behind his brother’s shield-arm. He is capable and he is strong, and he will be accompanied by a seiðkona and a phalanx of Einherjar. I will also have one of the divine with him.”

“It better not be Týr,” he says before he can think, and Odin’s eye narrows.

“Týr will do as he is bidden by his king.”

“Yes, and it is hardly my fault that he would choose to bait my son when so deep in his cups,” Loki adds with uncharacteristic spirit as he dips again into the argument of first son and father. “Fenrir only responded as was his nature.”

“As all children are wont to do,” Odin adds, dangerously even. Loki actually sways back in his seat, fingers stilling over his disembowelled fruit. The Allfather’s expression is nearing thunderous as he looks to his eldest.

“I will hear no further argument, Thor. Your king has spoken.” Said king rises and his sons must too; Thor scrambles with sullen limbs though Loki rises as do the moons, silent and smooth against the star-spangled sky. “Councils will be called to further discuss your journeys upon the morrow. Thor, I expect you to come to the chamber of ravens when you are done here. Loki, the same, but when the sun has passed the meridian.”

“Of course, Father,” he murmurs with chin upon his chest; Thor is, as always, far less gracious.

“Father.”

Seething, eyes upon the table, Thor slumps down in his own chair the moment Odin is gone. Without a word Loki turns from the table and leaves. Thor stares after him for a long moment, absolutely taken aback. It gives him headstart enough that when Thor finally lunges for the door, Loki is out of sight. Yet without thought he is chasing him down, half-breathless with surprise more than exertion. Loki must hear his approach – half the city likely can – but even when Thor catches sight of him gliding about a corner he does not slow, does not turn. Then Thor’s wrist is about his and he must do both.

 “Loki?” he says, and when his brother merely blinks at him his hand tightens about his wrist so hard the more sensible part of his brain warns it must be hurting him. “ _Loki_!”

“Thor, you have your own matters to attend. You haven’t the time to be trailing me about while I deal with my own.”

“I need to ask you something,” he insists, not letting go. “And I would have asked you this morning, had you not left my bed without saying goodbye.”

Loki’s eyes widen. A moment later he is moving back, and given Thor’s hand is still about his wrist it means Loki effectively drags him into one of the alcoves. Squirrelled away this, they are pressed almost uncomfortably close together as he hisses: “You fool, do _not_ say such things in public where anyone might hear them.”

“I hardly think you ought to feel concerned, after what you did last night.”

“Do you ever listen to what I say?” Not that Loki gives him time to answer. “Obviously not. By the Nine…Thor, nobody saw that.”

“But you said—”

“You heard what I said, but you didn’t listen to what I meant.” There’s something else he wants to say, because he bites his lip and looks away with a suddenness Thor cannot discern the nature of. When he looks back, he appears merely frustrated. “I should not have stayed.”

“Well, perhaps next time you accidentally tarry in my bed, I will just tie you down so the decision is no longer yours.”

Thor hadn’t really expected it to lighten the mood, but although Loki’s laugh is small, half-concealed, Thor knows him well enough to hear it. Still he turns away. “I have work to do.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

Loki raises his hand, the wrist still encircled by Thor’s fingers, and gives him an arch look. “I haven’t allowed you to ask it.”

“Have you had any peculiar dreams as of late?”

It is unusual to see Loki lost for words. Such a state cannot last long, but when he does speak he is incredulous. “What?”

“Have your dreams been odd, recently?” Dogged, Thor feels his fingers tighten even though he doesn’t truly think to do it. “I merely—”

“No. I haven’t.” When Loki wrenches his hand free, the motion is as vicious as the dark shine of his eyes. “What business are my dreams of yours?”

Taken aback, Thor can only stare. “Should they not be my business?”

“Not everything I am belongs to you, brother.” Rubbing his wrist, lips twisted, he adds with glacial cool: “My king or not, I am still myself before I am yours.”

With a swirl of his coat Loki is moving away, dark shadow against burnished hallways. Thor wants to reach out, but the memory of Loki’s wrist grinding between his fingers stills his hand. “Loki – Loki, _wait_.” Swiftly as his brother moves, Thor keeps easy pace with him. “Forgive me, I did not mean to give offense.”

“Well, you made a remarkably good attempt at doing so all the same.” And there is a peculiar involuntary quality to his next words, though Loki walks still. “Have your dreams been peculiar, then?”

“I…I’m not sure.”

This time Loki stops, lips pursed. “Thor. Is there a _point_ to any of this?”

 _I do not wish for you to go back to that place._ The words, true and unspoken yet, bring with them the bitter taste of a poisoned well in his mouth. But before he can speak, a hand claps upon his shoulder.

“There you are, Thor!” Fandral brings with him the scent of the latest fashion of the court, his eyes as bright as the jewels stitched upon his surcoat. “The Allfather calls us to council, and I hear rumour of a ride to the heart of Vanaheimr itself! Do you think I might be made particular envoy to all the very prettiest ladies of the Vanir court?”

Thor gives Loki a pained look, but his brother’s face is smooth and serene as he gives a courtly nod to them both. “If you’ll excuse me.”

“Of course.” Generously he expands his grin to him, though even Fandral learned long ago that Loki has no wish to be touched without invitation. His hand he stays, but his eyes are warm. “It is a pity you cannot accompany us, Loki. Between your silver tongue and my dashing form, we might have cut quite a swathe through such a glorious court.”

“What am I, chopped liver?” Thor protests, and Fandral chortles.

“Oh, I am sure your _mighty_ hammer would have found something to beat itself against.” Already Thor wishes he hadn’t said anything, is unable to meet Loki’s watchful eye as Fandral slings an arm about his shoulders. “Come, Thor, we must prepare for our journey.” Still, Fandral gives Loki another wide grin. “We shall see you at dinner, yes?”

“Perhaps you may.”

But before Thor can say anything more to Loki’s enigmatic tranquillity he is pulled around and away and, through the agency of the crown prince’s duty, Loki is lost to him once more.

 

*****

 

All is in place. The council he had attended at his father’s request had been a crush of people, councillor and warrior alike; between words that came to blows and the clatter of sword over the scratch of stylus, things had ground to an eventual conclusion with only a smattering of bruising and one broken nose. Thus by Asgardian standards, the discussion had been rather pedestrian, for all the liveliness of its discourse.

 But Thor is uneasy. There remain some hours until the evening meal, one to be taken at the Allfather’s high table, and his body sings with energy withheld throughout the þing. He is the true declared heir – and while he is warrior still, Odin Allfather has long taught him that is unseemly for a king to descend to brawling with his thanes and lords. Therefore Thor had balled his fists upon his knees and kept his voice even and Mjölnir upon his belt while the following day’s travails had been planned.

Thor does wonder if Odin realises that it had not been his father’s example that had guided him, but rather the fact Loki has ever been a master of holding even his clever tongue in such matters.

Long strides bring Thor to the practice halls of the palace. While generally he prefers the camaraderie of the city, he is in no mood this late afternoon. The fields and salles will be crowded with warriors preparing for war, and with boys who wish only to go and find the glory promised in song and tale.

In this moment Thor himself has no care for glory. His body aches, but not with exertion; it is the effort of having contained himself for so long, his bright self kept behind a stern mask so like that of his father’s. He yearns now for release, though he knows not the name of those chains that have bound him so.

With so many called to council or to their arms, the palace training halls stand almost empty save for several Einherjar in instruction with the palace guard. Stepping far from their orbit, Thor moves to a weapons rack. Though Mjölnir is his true weapon, more an extension of both arm and spirit than a discrete object, he leaves her there and takes instead a sword. Two handed and heavy, wrought of many-folded steel with bronze and gold working, Thor hefts it high so that he might begin to move through the flowing stances of a training form. This is a dance without music, where the thud of his heart and the controlled pulse of every breath counts time enough.

Once, twice, three times he moves through the prescribed forms his body remembers more clearly than his mind ever will – but he is losing the rhythm, pushing too hard. His body cannot betray him, not when this is what it was raised to be, but there seems today to be an unspoken barrier between his self upon the realm and the deeper self he finds only in the joy of swing and slice. Thor wants to be motion without thought, and it is a path he knows well for he has walked it a thousand times and more. And yet every time he almost steps beyond that border between the mundane and the extraordinary, something weighs down both feet and hand and he cannot transcend.

“You exhaust only body and not mind,” observes a mild voice from what could be the distance of the Bifröst, or just mere steps. “It will not do you good.”

Thor’s breath escapes him in a vicious expulsion of air and frustration, but he does not stop. Rather, he propels himself around faster, harder, his blade more light upon the air than true form though it would cleave in twain any who dared step in its path. Yet the voice of his makeshift conscience keeps his own still council, and his distance. Thor is over-reaching himself, and he knows it; when he at last lowers the blade, his hair hangs in his face and perspiration beads upon his brow. The warrior stares, inscrutable and silent.

“Hogun.”

He nods, scarce acknowledgement. “Shall I spar with you?” Raising his own practice sword, with utter disregard for the laboured rise and fall of Thor’s chest, he adds, “You might do better with an actual opponent, rather than one made of air.”

With a snort he threads his fingers through his hair, pushes it back from his eyes where the sweat stings true and familiar. “But it will be there afterwards, ever waiting.”

“Something bothers you?”

Hogun, as with many another warrior, had been present at the Allfather’s þing that morning; he is one of those who will accompany him to the Vanir king’s hearth the next day. Though he had kept much to himself, no-one had thought much of it. It is simply Hogun’s way. Yet now, as he looks to the older man, Thor feels something odd stir. “It is not something easily spoken of.”

“I am not well known for my skills of speech,” Hogun replies, and there is a touch of the wry to his words as his hands heft the curved practice blade he has chosen. “This is all I have to offer.”

Thor will accept it, he knows – and yet his body is not ready. Shifting his weight, aching muscles already bunching themselves in anticipation of another bout, he says quietly: “Hogun, my friend, you speak so rarely of what is on your mind.”

“There are other ways to express oneself.” And for all the sword in his hand, another image entirely flashes through Thor’s mind, strange and very nearly sad. Thor has seen Hogun at his second calling, dark head bent over a scholar’s desk in the depths of the library that has more often been Loki’s haunt than Thor’s own. It had it fact been Loki to first tell Thor of Hogun’s work within those hushed walls.

The warrior’s hand, so deft and sure with mace and sword, is just as steady with brush and ink. It moves in the patterns of a language Thor cannot read, but one that Loki has assured him is that of Hogun’s own people. Beneath its passage come paintings of stark line and curve, tinted by only the faintest wash of colour. Delicate and precise, the fine detail of a careful hand; Bragi would know better, Thor has often thought, but even to his indelicate sense it seems poetry, wrought both in word and in picture. It is hard to know, for not only will Hogun never display them, he never speaks of them either. Perhaps does not even keep them for Thor has seen him upon the rainbow bridge, loosing them to the sky while Heimdall watches in silence with great hands about the hilt of the sword of the gatekeeper.

In earlier days, easy of thought, Thor had always believed perhaps Hogun had just been displeased with his work. In these changing times Thor wonders now if every word had been exactly as he wished it to be: set free and fluttering upon the space beyond the rainbow bridge and the bisecting Bifröst, loosed from his mind forevermore.

“It is not myself I worry for.” Thor’s hand tightens on the hilt. “It is Loki.”

Hogun holds his silence.

“He will not speak of it to me,” he says, and now his sword begins a gentle swing back and forth as his frustration begins to rise. “Is it _safe_ , to keep so much inside in such a manner?”

“You speak of Vanaheimr.”

Thor knows he could not have expected much more than impassive watchfulness from his old friend. Still he wishes for more. “Yes.”

“You do not know what happened to Loki there?”

Though Hogun’s tone is more curiosity than condemnation, Thor hunches forward. “I know the nature of it. But…not the detail. He will not speak of it.” The weight of the dream is a burden upon his shoulders, with the burning accusation of Loki’s gaze turned upon him. Thor has never been one for story or imagination; the stories he favours himself are of the hunt and of battle, embellished by camaraderie and mead. He cannot imagine having constructed such a tale for himself, but…how else…

_You do not even know what a binding spell truly is._

The shudder that rocks his body does not reach his hands; they are motionless strength about the hilt. Hogun is by contrast utterly still, dark eyes serene. “He is not yet ready. This you must accept.”

“But he will go there upon the morrow!” Thor says, and his sudden shout echoes not only from the distant walls, from seemingly from the sky itself. The sun hides its face behind an encroaching cloudbank even as Thor twists his lip, pulls his voice back from the edge. “…and I will not be there. Again, I will not be with him in that cursed place.”

“You have been tasked with your own duties by the king.”

That truth is not enough, Thor thinks. Not when he recalls the conversation with his mother; what he had said then is a fear grown instead of subdued.

_“What if he falls – or flies – all to pieces, and it’s because I have failed him?”_

“I should be by his side.”

“You go where your kingdom needs.”

 _I don’t care about Asgard_. With a jolt Thor looks up and into Hogun’s eyes, filled with sudden shame. Yet Hogun is no seiðmaðr. He cannot know the traitorous aside in Thor’s mind. With a grimace, he takes a step back, and despite the overwrought forms of earlier already his muscles are willingly flowing into readiness. “To be frank,” he says, even as Hogun moves into his own stance, “I do believe I could use that spar now.”

 

*****

 

Again Thor has not seen Loki all the day. Despite Fandral’s hopeful craning about, his wayward brother did not even appear at dinner. Though he’d certainly been under no direct obligation to attend, Thor still seethes through the entire meal. As soon as was possible, he excuses himself from the table and storms through the halls to his brother’s chambers.

The door to his outer chambers hits the wall so hard several nearby glass ornaments tremble with anticipation of sort sharp falls. Thor can’t regret it, not when he hadn’t even quite expected to find him, but there he is: curled up on the padded high-backed chair he favours for his reading with great tome spread across his knees, a scarcely-touched plate of fruit to one side.

“What happened to the tradition of knocking?” Loki asks mildly as he turns over a page, not looking up. Thor’s mouth scrunches up on a curse – he is in no mood for the mockery any such attempt at swearing will undoubtedly provoke from the Silvertongue – and his fists clench.

“You have come to ask me to countermand the Allfather’s wish, perhaps?” Calm as their mother at their father’s side, Loki flicks a long finger down the page in thoughtful passage. “Thor. The journey will go on whether you care for it to or not.”

In answer to that Thor wants to shout. He wants to pick up one of the many delicate precious things scattered about the chamber and hurl it through a window to shatter upon the cobbles many storeys below. But Loki will only keep on reading. He has read through many a storm, and will do so again, and they both know it to be true.

Instead he stomps over, snatches the book aside, and drops to his knees. With his hands on Loki’s thighs, thumbs and all fingers digging deep enough to bruise, he stares upward with a set jaw.

“At the risk of you punching me upside the head,” he says in counter to Loki’s surprise, “are you really certain you should be going back to where this all started?”

As soon as the words are done Thor braces himself for the impact of knuckles, or perhaps a heel to the solar plexus; neither would be a first. Instead, Loki blinks, rolls his eyes as if quite set upon.

“I’m not going.”

Relief wars with the sense of _that was far too easy_. “Truly?”

“You are.”

Definitely too easy. “What?”

Loki uses Thor’s shock to nudge him aside with a calf, climbing upward and moving towards the fireplace in his bedchamber. “Come here for a moment, I need to show you something.”

Frowning, Thor levers upward and follows. No fire blazes there, not that Loki seems to require one; he utterly ignores the cold grate as he positions his brother in front of one of the great mirrors that flank the stone, then nods critically. “Now just stand still. And close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so and you are a fool.”

For all Loki can hold his tongue when he wishes to, in private he never seems to bother with such niceties. Knowing that he is the only one who can do such things scarcely helps, though Thor obeys all the same. Then Loki’s hands open over him in pattern and power, his words soft susurration against the fabric of reality itself. The twisting change in the air shivers through his veins to then thrum deep in his bones, and all flows from Loki himself; he is gathering energy from the world itself as he taps into leyline and the life that moves along them in order to work his seiðr.

Along his skin it moves now, this prickling pleasure that just hovers below the threshold of pain. Then the hands move away and Loki lets out a low shaking breath.

“Open your eyes.”

When he does, when he is confronted by the truth of Loki’s handiwork, Thor is almost afraid. “I’m… _you_.”

“Yes.” Loki steps back, the doubled reflections at odds with one another; the true Loki smiles, while the one that stands in Thor’s place is bewildered, and somehow terribly, markedly young, for all he knows this façade to bear the same age as its original. This seems to amuse Loki only all the more. “The resemblance is rather striking, is it not?”

“I had no…” Reaching one hand forward, Thor rests it upon the chill glass for a scarce second before yanking the pale hand back as if shocked. “…have you always been able to do this?”

“No.” Stepping back as Thor turns to him, Loki gives him a peculiarly knowing little smile. “And before you ask, no, I could not do it for just anyone. I need to know the person whose form I am weaving very well – and I know myself _very_ well.” By now his mouth has turned a fresh smirk, and it twists low in Thor’s abdomen before settling lower still. “As do I _you_.”

“What are you saying?”

“You are going to the remains of our prison.” His casual amusement rests upon Thor’s heated skin like soft rains. “And I am going to the capital.”

“Loki.” In instantaneous denial his hands dart out, fingers closing about Loki’s upper arms. “What… _no_.”

“Yes.” Unmoved, Loki does not even blink. “And I shall go wearing your face, and you will wear mine.”

In the face of such serenity Thor has only one word to offer: “ _Why_?”

“Because I do not trust the ambassador. And neither should the Allfather.”

The deeper political games of kingship have always been beyond Thor, and for all Loki has spent most of their lives despairing over that fact it has rarely bothered him. From earliest childhood Thor believed little could not be righted by judicious application of brute strength, and for what little remained he knew his brother would work his silver-tongued magics upon it. In these peculiar days, however, he is beginning to realise how sharp a blade Loki keeps sheathed in his watchful mind, and how Thor himself might never raise it in the way Loki cannot heft Mjölnir.

“But he does trust him.”

“Indeed he does,” Loki parries with faint scorn, and Thor cannot help but believe he hears it only because Loki allows it. “The Allfather is not all wise, Thor. He simply does not wish to consider how deeply this corruption has spread.”

“But to the capital? To the _king_?” His mind is beginning to reel with the implication, and for all he has longed for such a great war as is sung of across the banquet tables, he feels ill. If even Odin Allfather cannot acknowledge… “Loki, I cannot allow—”

“The Allfather has been asked to send his heir.” Shrugging off his brother’s hands, he steps back into the rising shadow. “But you said yourself only this morning that you are not the one who should be making this journey. It should be me.”

Much as he cannot argue such a truth, Thor feels he must protest all the same. “No, it should not. This is not how it should be.”

“Oh, must you be so obtuse? I am the diplomat of the pair of us,” Loki says, bitterness only held in check by the glitter of glee that shimmers across his eyes. “But then he is not wrong, for they will not accept the second son, the silvertongued liar. They want the golden prince of Asgard.”

“Which you will not give them.”

“There is much to be seen,” he says with a nod, his agreement light. “And forgive me, brother, for all you are not quite the fool I would name you, it is not something I expect you to be able to see.”

“Seiðr?” His single word is doubtful, Loki’s answering shrug a mask over a stranger’s face.

“Something like that.”

His mind alights quite suddenly upon a defence. “I’m not going to be able to see anything of the sort at the oracle site either, you realise? So what point my going? I should be with you.”

“There is nothing left to be seen there, therefore do not concern yourself over that,” Loki says with dismissive ease. “It is merely a token gesture so that both you and I may be on Vanaheimr simultaneously; I could not work such a glamour over so great a distance between us.”

“And Father will not know of it?”

“Father would not approve,” Loki demurs, and the glint in his eye takes Thor back to many a childhood day that had begun with Thor’s enthusiastic pleas and ended with Loki’s silver tongue pleading for clemency before the Allfather’s disapproval. “And so we shall not tell him.”

“Heimdall will in our place.”

“Not if Heimdall does not know.”

The quick feet have moved Loki away again, and Thor watches his pacing step with furrowed brows. “He can see us.”

“No.” Loki strides back over, catches his face between his again; there is that wild look to his eyes now, like a mare loosed from the saddle and left to run the fields alone. “No, he cannot.”

“What do you mean, he can’t see us?” A prickling sensation moves over his skin, and he must resist the urge to cast wild eyes about the room. “Heimdall sees all.”

“Not right this moment he doesn’t.”

“He…” Loki’s glee in his astonishment actually very nearly hurts. “…you are shielded from his sight?”

“Yes. As are you.”

“How is that possible?”

“Think of a shadow, Thor. On a cloudy day, it cannot be seen, yes?” A careless flick of the hand, and he steps closer; his green eyes seem to fill the world as he leans closer and whispers: “It does not mean it is not still there. It is simply that the sun is not there to cast it into sight. But still it remains. Ever waiting. Ever watching.”

“And this does not disturb him?”

Loki leans back, the tip of his tongue teasing beneath the straight line of his teeth. “Has he reason not to trust in me?”

“We’re going behind the Allfather’s back!”

If cats could truly smile, it would be like this: feral and wide with teeth masked behind the curl of vibrating whisker, every word flush with the satisfied vibration of purred conviction. “It is for a greater cause.”

“There is no greater cause than Asgard!”

“Isn’t there?” Careless, stepping backward again with his hands held upward, Loki doesn’t bother to hold in his light laughter. “He knows why I do it. I told you before, we discussed the manner in which we were masked in Vanaheimr, and he is aware that I have been working towards an understanding of how.”

“And we are shielded now?”

“More or less.”

That little shrug ought to concern him; he’s seen it at the beginning of more than enough pranks to know Loki’s mind is never stilled. Then his brother extends one hand and with a sense of deep trepidation, feeling like a child, Thor takes his first steps. They are deeply odd for while this state leaves him almost as tall as his own body, this one hold a different composition. Everything about him is gangly, almost, too long, too fluid. There’s strength there – perhaps more than he’s ever given his brother credit for, but it is like a whip rather than a hammer. Taking another step forward Thor feels almost too primed, as if he moves too quick he’ll only flick the tip back and take out his own eye.

“Yes, if we are going to do this, we need to do a little work.”

Under Loki’s critical eye he stops dead, insulted. “Work?”

“I won’t require you to do much at the site of the oracle. As I said, there is nothing there – and those who will accompany you haven’t really the slightest clue what to look for even if it had been present still.” Raking a hand back through his hair in an entirely abnormal gesture of frustration, Loki heaves an aggrieved breath. “I’ll have to suffer something of my reputation, but then there’s nothing much to lose in the first place.”

Much as he hates to hear his brother speak that way, Thor knows enough to realise Loki won’t take kindly to contradiction this moment. “Oh, and you would be so good at pretending to be me?” he says instead, and Loki’s eyes are dark.

“I am your shadow, Thor. I think I know how to move like you do, although I choose more often not to.”

In that he is silenced, though Loki is moving forward, hands upon his hips as his head moves in a critical tilt.

“Come, let me show you. Stand up.”

“Must you be so domineering?”

“Yes. Up.” Already Loki is straightening reluctant shoulders, flicking away imaginary dust from the same. “You need not be perfect – I think you’ll find most people will not pay close enough attention for it to matter. But you mustn’t draw attention to yourself by being too different to myself.”

Squirming under Loki’s ministrations, Thor furrows his brow. “How so?”

“Move like me.” Angling away, he cocks a wrist like he is summoning a hound. “Walk two paces behind.”

He doesn’t. “Is this…good for the child?”

The _look_ this earns him makes him regret the words even before Loki’s tongue twists hard over one word fit enough to break it in two. “ _What_?”

“You. If you change your form…” Much as Loki’s glare should be unmaking him molecule by molecule, he goes on. “…I thought the reason you remained a mare while you bore Sleipnir was because you couldn’t shift back while you were carrying a child.”

“I was carrying a _horse_. Therefore, I had to be a horse to do so.”

The withering tone doesn’t help, but then if Thor folded under such he’d have stopped speaking to Loki at all centuries ago. Instead he moves his hands over the borrowed form, frowning. “And this…?”

“These are just glamours, Thor. Rather complex glamours, yes, but nothing that is going to harm your get.”

“Don’t…” He doesn’t want to get angry, not now, not for this reason. “…don’t talk this way.”

This time when Loki stares, Thor feels as if he might curl in upon himself and fossilise, like the tiny stones they had spent days digging out of sand dunes below Þrúðvangr one childish summer. Indeed, he feels his mouth is cracking like shale as he attempts to smile, as if it might attract the same upon his brother’s now-stilled lips.

“Loki, you _know_ I have no true idea of the workings of magic. I only ask because I don’t understand.”

“And because you would rather I stayed here in this gilded cage instead of fighting for the realm that is as much mine as it is yours?” Scornful, Loki pushes up again, turns his back. “I don’t have to be king to lay down my life for my realm, Thor. In fact I probably have more right to do so, because you need to live to rule it. I just need to live as long as is needed to preserve it to be ruled.”

“No.” Thor’s hands are fists like granite. “ _No_.”

“Oh dear, I can sense another attempt at poetry coming on.” Turning back, he strides close, lips so close and yet so far as they curl around his cool-fury words. “I would ask Bragi to spend some time with you in order to help you improve your frankly lacking skills in that department, but the last I saw Bragi he was so deep in his cups I rather thought he was trying to learn to breathe underwater. Perhaps he wishes to spend more time with Jörmungandr, do you think?”

“I think your son has better taste than Bragi.”

“I would have said the same for Iðunn, once.”

“Loki, I mean it,” Thor says, sharp now as he retreats from such pointless and half-hearted banter. “Without you, there is no realm worth ruling.”

And Loki rolls his eyes skyward, walks away. “Why do you think I am trying to preserve it?” he returns, turning back; a moment later he strides forward, snatches up his hand and curls his fingers so tight Thor cannot contain a gasp. “You have to trust me. How many times must I say it? I would do nothing to harm this child. But understand that if I literally _do nothing_ and just remain in Asgard while war comes to our doors, then that would be more harm to our child than my going back to Vanaheimr now, whether wearing your face or my own.”

The relentless passion of Loki’s words hurts both his head, and his heart. “Let’s just…fine. _Fine_. Let us do this thing, if it would please you.”

At first Loki’s eyes narrow, and Thor can feel an argument upon his tongue. Then he drops his hand, mouth pursed. “Follow me, then.” Then, thrown back over his shoulder: “And do as I do.”

Certainly such training is not an alien concept; many of his weapons lessons had proceeded in such a fashion, where the tutor had shown and the pupil followed as best as he might so his form could be corrected and refined as the movement became more natural and instinctive. But such movements had always come naturally to him, and Loki’s elegance of motion is not as his. Thor has a grace of his own, he knows, but it is bold and brash and brilliant. Loki slinks in regal shadow, like a silver fish gliding just beneath the surface of a sparkling rushing river. It is something only just seen, too quick to really catch by eye, and certainly not in hand – and of course it is beautiful, in a fleeting foreign sense.

Though Thor moves easily, he has never done so lightly. Loki is quickly irritated by the sound he makes and compares him to a bilgesnipe, which ends in a scuffle Thor is mortified to actually _lose_ ; Loki sits on his hips with a peculiar frown on his face for a long queer moment, before shaking his head.

“See?” The despair is almost as sharp as his irritation. “You have no control over this body.”

Thor wants to reach forward, to the crotch conveniently in his line of sight, but he knows that that is not what they need to be focused upon. Loki still catches the thought, rolls his eyes hard as he pokes him low in the stomach.

“You are not paying _attention_ ,” he scowls. “So do you not believe me, when I tell you that our child is not harmed by this?”

At first Thor is confused. Then, he scowls himself, though any annoyance must vie for relief at the thought Loki doesn’t seem to realise Thor has been thinking with his other head once again. “Of course I believe you!”

“Think upon it, Thor.” Resting back on Thor’s thighs, arms crossed over the narrow chest they now share, he scowls deeper. “This is a mere glamour, for a true transformation spell would have been noticeable to anyone who cared look.”

“Surely a glamour would be more obvious.”

“Because you look and you do not see.” When he realises this means nothing to Thor’s mind, Loki presses the heels of both hands against his cheekbones, fingertips digging into his hairline. “A glamour permits the one beneath to still hold true to the sense of self. Any true shift is the loss of that.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You think you are me on the outside – you even feel things as I would. The illusion is strong enough to affect not only the way the world sees you, but the way the world itself acts upon your senses.” When he drops his hands, his eyes are weary with frustration. “But at your heart, you are still _Thor_ , yes?”

“So when you shift shape…”

“The truest part of me remains Loki. But it is secret, and it is small.” A slight chuckle works free of his lips, cuts off sharply like a bubble losing all surface tension. “Sometimes I do not think you realise how close you were to losing me, when I bore Sleipnir.”

Thor has gone very still, but Loki’s words are relentless.

“And do you not think it would have been far more sensible to make me big, blond, and brawn in the fashion of yourself, had the Allfather intended me to be truly disguised as Aesir? Why would he leave me in this body, which is little more than the closest facsimile to my Jötunn self the Aesir glamour can manufacture?”

Thor lets the thought stand a moment; Loki wants him to understand his point for himself, but sorcery has never been his study, nor even his interest. “So he wanted you to know…?”

“I always _knew_ ,” he says, irritated; Thor realises he has missed Loki’s point entirely even as his brother mutters: “I just never _realised_.” Dismissing any further discourse, climbing to his feet, Loki thrusts out a hand and wriggles the fingers impatiently. “But this is not what we are to be concentrating on. Your child is safe from my seiðr. Now do as I say.”

“Safe _by_ your seiðr.”

“That is not what I said,” he says, but even through the double correction Loki wears a faint smile. It fades as they go to work; Thor finds nothing easy in this, while Loki’s frustration rises and falls like the tide. Finally, after the stars have shifted noticeably west in their eternal round of the sky, Loki seems to find some satisfaction in Thor’s efforts.

“It will suffice.” He says this only grudgingly, leaning down to pick up a wrap Thor recognises as having been woven by Frigga many a year ago. She had spun the thread herself; he remembers seeing the shimmering wool wrapped about her distaff as a child, winding to the spindle as she had worked. Despite its age and the wear Loki has had out of it, it still seems thick and warm as he drapes it about his shoulders and moves to the sideboard.

“ _If_ I will do it,” Thor says, eventually; Loki turns with a glass in hand, frown firmly in place.

“Why would you not?”

“Why do we not take this to Father?”

He downs an unfamiliar liquid – something thick and herbal, judging the rich fragrance that drifts to Thor even at this distance, and grimaces. “Because I have already expressed my concern and been summarily told it is _not_ my concern.”

“Then why persist?”

“Because I was there, Thor, and I saw what they did.” The glass hits the carved wood with such force the bottle next to it rattles precariously. “The Allfather did not.”

“I was there too.”

“But you did not see.”

“You said there was nothing to see there!”

“Nothing _left_ ,” he corrects irritably, and abandons the glass as he crosses back to his favoured chair. Easing downward, he rolls his eyes skyward. “I need to take my eyes elsewhere, Thor, and they will not be expecting me there if I am in the guise of you.”

“Let me consider it,” Thor says, eventually. Gathering his wrap about his shoulders, Loki pulls his legs up beneath him and gives Thor the look that reminds him of the way he’d sulked for hours whenever Thor hid his favourite books in an attempt to get him to come outside.

“We hardly have the time,” he mutters, and Thor shrugs.

“We have all night.”

“I suppose we do.”

But for all he’s just said as much with a little scoffing chuckle, Loki is already leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. The urge to go to his side is strong; Thor abruptly wants little more than to touch him, to trail fingers across his jaw and then curve them down beneath both material and lunala to trace the unseen patterns of the skin beneath.

Yet something stays his hand: the exhaustion now apparent upon Loki’s face, sudden and strange as he takes a deep breath, lets it go. He’s not eating properly, yet again. Thor has seen him in such a state many times over the years; it always goes this way, whenever Loki becomes so invested in his work that nothing else seems important. Even Thor himself has been often pushed aside in favour of some unknown spell or strange new alchemy. He cannot compete with legend and incantation and has learned many times to not even try.

Sleep, too, will fall by the wayside when Loki decides it has little worth to him. It strikes Thor then that for all the time he has spent with Loki since their return from Vanaheimr, he has not truly seen him sleep. That is why he keeps his hands to himself.

Seated before the unlit fire with elbow on one propped knee, he watches as Loki’s breathing becomes ever slower, evening out into the rhythm of an old lullaby. Seeing Loki so feels odd, to him. It’s a vulnerable state, of course, and that suits Loki ill; even on campaign or when hunting or while simply travelling the realms, Loki keeps very much to himself in slumber. More often than not, when Thor has wakened to take watch during such nights, Loki is awake yet and will appear not to have slept at all. Ever watchful, is his constant shadow.

But when Thor looks down to his hands, those he does not intend to lay upon his brother now – it strikes him that they are not _his_ hands. He is in control of them, but they are not his own. They are Loki’s. And so is the body to which they are attached. A moment later the thought takes him by the throat, quickens his heart, and will not let him go.

He need not touch Loki. Because, in this much at least, he _is_ Loki.

Sensation already begins to crawl over the borrowed skin as he casts a look back to the slumbering figure. His brother does appear to be drowsing deeper by the moment, if not outright sleeping just yet. Swallowing hard, Thor looks down to the borrowed form he wears. Pushing up from the bear-skin rug, he sways slightly; Loki’s centre of gravity is slightly lower than his own, but then his body is also lighter.

Pausing before one of the two great mirrors, at first Thor can do little more than stare. The deep green eyes that regard him with wide-eyed wonder are those of another, but Thor can see his own soul, startled and strange, lurking just behind. He cannot meet that chimerical gaze for long. Loki’s form is so very precious that it seems almost a travesty to think it so easily shifted and given away.

When he glances back, his brother’s exhaustion feels a palpable thing. Thor turns away. Perhaps it is not so easy after all.

With the borrowed reflection before him again, Thor frowns despite having long since become intimately familiar with the workings of Loki’s chosen garb. Without thought his hands rise, and Thor cannot quite believe what he is about to do. But he strips the clothes free without hesitation, without pause, though he takes it slow. In this motion these fingers are nowhere near as clever as they would be should his brother be in control. But he does not want to tease himself, not exactly. In fact he feels almost fearful – but Loki sleeps on as Thor strips nude, and then stares at what his brother has gifted him.

In these days Thor is almost as familiar with his brother’s body as he is his own. He’d known much of it just from how they’d been raised together, but since Vanaheimr he has come to know of deeper mysteries, discovering those places where the touch of a finger or lips or the pressure and heat of tongue or cock or crooked teasing finger can break even the Liesmith’s most fabled restraint.

Yet he had never thought to know how it _felt_. One finger rises, presses tremor-light against his lower lip, and his throat works as he swallows convulsively. Between his legs, his cock already gives a curious, knowing twitch; the true Loki sighs in his half-sleep and Thor’s other hand drops down, fingertips brushing the skin as the bloodflow both deepens and strengthens its rising weight. At first he is as cautious as a boy discovering his organ for the first time; then his fingers tighten and but a scarce moment later the jerk of his hand is the practised gesture of a man who will take what he knows he wants.

He had not truly expected it to feel different, and in many ways it does not. Loki himself had said that this is a glamour and not true shape-shifting; therefore  if Loki’s Jötunn physiology gives a different experience, Thor still cannot know of it. But as he works what he sees and feels as his brother’s cock, hand alternately squeezing and loosening on the downstroke, Thor moves the other, raises it to his throat in probing curiosity.

It’s long been force of habit for him to grasp his brother just here. He’s never quite known why, but it seems to have become something between familiarity and ease to him, encouraged by the fact that Loki appears to enjoy it. Beneath that touch Loki always curves into his palm, the stiff line of his shoulders slipping downward whenever Thor curls fingers into the hair at the base of his neck. And as the pad of his thumb now works under the jaw, the fingertips ghosting over the delicate skin beneath the pinna before working further back, a shiver of sensation shimmies down his spine and spreads through his groin.

Thor _groans_. With such a response wired into his skin, it is no wonder Loki responds like a cat to such touch, involuntary and yearning. Thor’s hand tightens further about his cock, moves faster even as his fingers dig deeper. His breath comes faster and he is grunting and he needs to stop, he needs to bite back on that little keening whine just slipping from betwixt his lips but it is _Loki’s_ voice and it only heightens the pleasure already threatening to rend him all to pieces.

Then his hand slips and a nail scrapes and the pain sizzles fresh pleasure along every nerve and he gasps something that could have been a name might have been a curse but was probably the bastard child of both. A moment laughter curls like smoke about his liquid thoughts and a second hand joins his; it caresses over-sensitised skin with knowing skill as a familiar body presses sinuously against his; the whisper in his ear is chuckling and low.

“ _And aren’t we the pretty pair, brother mine_?”

When he comes, it is into his own hand and his brother’s and yet both are Loki and nothing else seems real even as everything about this moment cannot be anything but impossible.

Still, when his knees finally give out on him, the true Loki following him down in languid curve to the furs before the cool hearth, he knows that this is real and this has happened. For that, Thor cannot quite bring himself to meet his brother’s eyes. Yet Loki traces a lazy hand over his hip, and Thor cannot look away from its knowing easy passage. “Is…is this not…peculiar, for you?”

“In what manner?”

His amusement just ties Thor’s tongue in further knots. “You…this…pleasuring yourself.”

“Why break the habit of a lifetime? You cannot tell me you have not done the same.”

The more Thor tries to beat down his rising flush, the more blood moves beneath his skin. “Not like _this_!”

“Ah,” Loki says with wry thoughtfulness while his hand dips lower, fingertips trailing over his spent cock, “but I have.”

Even as Thor is relieved that his brother’s hand has moved on, his hips twitch forward as if to follow their languid passage upward. And his curiosity cannot let it lie here. “What are you saying…?”

In the low light, Loki’s smile is as much a sly promise as the trace of one finger in light zigzag over the line of Thor’s ribcage. “It’s not something I have done often. It is difficult, of course, to maintain even an illusion of one’s self. This is far easier, for it a mere glamour over what is already solid on its own account.”

“You…” Dizzied, he thinks Loki would be a fool to think he will get anything else useful out of Thor this evening after putting such images into his head. “You have…”

“Yes.” Again a hand moves over his skin, lazy heat and promise. “Yes, I have.”

In silence, Thor feels his vision blur, cannot even now look up.

“My depravity knows no bounds,” Loki says with low irony, and finally Thor meets his eyes with wide shock.

“It’s not depravity!”

“Isn’t it?”

Again his face flushes; he hasn’t felt like such an unknowing innocent in centuries. The fact that it is his younger brother making him feel so, watching him with easy amusement as one hand strokes thoughtfully along one exposed flank, only makes it all the worse. “No,” he says, and his voice grows in strength even as his heart beats an uncertain staccato behind the steadying weight of his breastbone. “Would you do it for me?”

“Do what?”

The innocence of his words is utterly at odds with the wicked glint in his eyes. Thor lets him have his victory, lets him hold the blade steady as he rushes upon it. “Take me.”

And though his eyes flare with want, his head moves in a weary to and fro. “Thor—”

“Will it help if I beg?”

He has managed to surprise Loki. “Actually, probably not. Not while wearing my face.” And there is just the faintest flicker of something Thor cannot read when Loki moves his hand from its loose cradle about one buttock, brushes a lock of dishevelled dark hair from Thor’s borrowed eyes. “In your own, however…you could beg me to do anything.”

“And you would do it?”

“Peculiar, seeing your little soul peering out from behind my own eyes.” Loki still appears tired even in the face of his brother’s persistence; it only makes it all the more surprising when he rises to his knees and pushes him back. “Don’t say a word, then – or I _will_ stop.”

Thor nods. He doesn’t think he could speak even if he wanted to, not as Loki takes his hand and leads him into the bedchamber so he might press him down upon the bed. There are no words at all as Loki sits back on his heels, spreading legs that look like his own wide as he props the knees up. Even though it is so recently spent Thor’s cock still twitches with interest as Loki pulls from the air that sweet-scent unguent he so favours, long fingers passing through though it never seems to empty.

And then they are pressing into him into _himself_ and Thor gasps in surprise. There is something in this, more than just the sharp sweet tang of Iðunn’s golden apples; as it touches his skin it warms, tingles, a thousand little pinpricks of sudden sensation.

“What…what _is_ that?”

“My little secret,” Loki says, and then the other hand snaps up and then he pulls on his hair, sharp sudden snap. “And didn’t I tell you _not one word_?”

Thor swallows, meeting his brother’s eyes. He says nothing, and Loki’s smile widens.

“That was your last warning.” And he twists his fingers and though this is not the first time Loki has sought to give him pleasure this way it feels though it might be; perhaps Loki’s body is just more sensitive than his own. A cry rips from his throat, and then again, two fingers working in and out. Always the tips brush that place inside him that jerks through his spine and settles in his groin, as if Loki knows exactly where to find it – but then this is as his body, sensitive in the same fashion, and even though Thor could not hope to understand such things even when his mind is not clouded so he must wonder at the power of such a glamour—

Then suddenly the fingers are gone, pulled free. He gives a long groan wrought entirely of disappointment. But Loki is already coming forward, settling his hips low as he comes to lean over him, the fall of his hair feathering across Thor’s sweat-sheened skin.

“Do you want this now?” he says. Thor blinks, bemused and aching, and of course Loki laughs as he traces a fingertip down the indent of his chest. “Oh, you clever little thing! It must be that wearing my skin helps you keep your wits about you, even when I do _this_ ,” and a nail rakes up his cock while Thor’s whole body snaps upward with the force of his gasping breath. “But this is the first time, isn’t it? Do you want it to be this way?”

Loki had spoken only words, nothing of touch. And so Thor reaches up, grasps Loki’s cock and pulls it silently towards the glistening cleft. As the head nudges against the twitch of his entrance Loki smiles, low and darkly amused. First, he presses a kiss to trembling lips. Then, he whispers just beside his ear: “So mote it be.”

It is an incantation, a call to arms, though when he presses his cock deep in one motion it is more like a sword sheathing home.

Thor is taken up in a haze, a _storm_ of sensation – and how peculiar it is, to hear only Loki’s voice, in counterpoint to his own. It is Loki’s voice mewling from his own lips, while it comes low and strong from Loki’s true throat. His own voice has been stolen clean away, as if Thor is not truly here. Such disconnection makes this unreal, dreamlike – but then so much of his life as of late has changed, and all of a casual hunting trip into Vanaheimr. Now he is acknowledged heir, now they teeter on the edge of war, now Loki is brother-lover-other-half and carries his child, and…

When Loki had gone to his knees in the weapons vault beneath the weight of prophecy and heritage alike, Thor had known the deep desire to fill the empty spaces in his brother; he is terrified even now that he might break should he not. But now Thor is the one filled – though he wears his brother’s face, though it is Loki himself who fills him. Confusion wars with the peculiarity of this truth, as if the world might never make sense again. _Is this what it is, to walk a battlefield in another’s armour?_ he wonders. But instead he wears the body, as the true owner presses into him.

His kisses are deep and slow, and then Loki pulls out, pulls away. Thor’s eyes open, a half-through protest threatening upon his tongue – but Loki is pulling him over and then pushing in again and now Thor is on his knees. Then Loki rocks ever harder, with the slap of thighs a rhythm of quick-quick-slow. Again he finds with such unerring accuracy that sweet secret place so that Thor’s arms give out, and he goes down. Half-suffocated though he is, face buried in feather-down pillow, Thor does not drown. Rather, he floats upon the cresting waves of his release. With but a few more thrusts Loki follows him over and under and only then, together, do they drown in this shared ocean.

Loki shifts later, rolls over. Still in his borrowed skin Thor rolls over himself to find his brother’s back presented to him, a tensed bow in the darkness as he sits upon the edge of the bed. Frowning, Thor sits up, leans over just enough to wrap pale arms about a pale waist and to gather him close, and pulls him back and down.

At first he resists. Then he surrenders, though Loki still holds himself separate when they are both back beneath the covers. It seems strange to him, that he does not insist on bathing, rather just curls himself into a tight ball with his face turned deep into the pillows. In fact Loki gives a great sigh, sudden and strange, and Thor feels a shiver across his skin. It’s pain, of a sort, though nothing Thor has ever felt before. Then his limbs feel paradoxically both heavier and lighter, as if freed from unseen manacles. Raising a hand he finds it familiar, callused, that of a seasoned warrior rather than a prowling seiðmaðr.

Returning his attention to Loki, he finds him lingering upon the very verge of sleep and supposes that is why the spell gave out. Weaving his fingers through his hair, Thor gives a soft tug and Loki stirs unhappily. It’s clear he does not wish to be awakened, but he opens his eyes with the bleary resentment of a child cleaving to the will of an overproud parent.

“I would do this again,” Thor says, soft. “In our true forms.”

“What?”

The bleary-eyed irritation makes him smile even as he continues to work his fingers through the sweat-tangled mess of Loki’s dark hair. “I wish to have you inside me.”

The answering groan comes from low in his chest. “I am tired tonight, Thor. You have quite exhausted me.” Scrunching down in the bed, eyes falling closed, Thor barely hears the muttered: “Another night, perhaps.”

And though he smiles still, fingers working over the familiar curve of his scalp, Thor knows now the faint fear of _never again_. It’s not a new feeling; any blooded warrior with any sense at all feels as such before any sortie, no matter how pedestrian. Even gods can fall.

“ _No_ , Thor,” Loki says, stronger this time, and even as Thor frowns he wonders if Loki truly can read his mind.

“On one condition, then.”

Incredulous disbelief cracks open one eye. “A _condition_?”

“I…I would like to see it.”

Confusion is not something Loki wears well and it’s likely he knows it, as he now opens both eyes but scrunches up his entire face as if even the dim light is blinding him. “See _what_?”

“You.” Embarrassment is not something he’s familiar with, but it heats his skin now. “And your…double.”

At first all Loki can do is just scrub the back of one hand across his bleary eyes. When he fixes them upon Thor again, something of his usual sharp intelligence has reawakened. “You are telling me that you would have me rut with my shadow selves before you for your pleasure,” Loki says with an eyebrow curved high, “and then heighten said pleasure by fucking you in turn?”

“I know it sounds depraved—”

“It fact it sounds delicious,” he says, interrupting the tumble of Thor’s words with ease even as his entire body shifts with stiffness, eyes slipping closed again as he subsides back into the curve of sleep. “But another night.”

Clear as it is that his brother wants to be left to his rest, Thor cannot let him go just yet. “Loki?”

“ _Yes_?”

“You say there is nothing to be seen at the oracle site.”

This time when he groans, it is not just irritation; another person might not have heard it, but Thor knows his brother, and often as Loki has called him a great galoot he can still hear the faint but true discomfort that lurks beneath. “There isn’t.”

“What about in your mind?”

Loki’s eyes open, and they are dark and cold. “Is this really the time to be discussing this?” Still, they soften with something rather close to mischief a moment later when he adds carelessly: “Besides, it is a moot point. I am not going there. You are.”

“I never agreed to that.”

“Didn’t you?” And he rolls over, curling about his abdomen. “Good night, Thor.”

Staring at the long slender line of exposed pale back, Thor cannot help but remember the dream. He reaches out, drifts a finger down the steps of his brother’s spine, and sighs.

“I love you.”

“And I know it.” His ribcage rises, falls with another long exhalation. “ _Sleep_ , now.”

But he doesn’t. Rising from the bed he goes to the window instead, perches upon the wide sill wearing nothing but his own skin. There, Thor listens to his brother’s every even breath as he stares out into the sky hung with stars and the half-curves of a half dozen planets, and wonders how long Loki can keep such matters to himself.

There should be no secrets between them. Looking back to see his brother’s pale face half-wrought in shadow only strengthens his resolve. No secrets – especially not when they must already keep so much secret from everybody else.


	6. Or In Memories Draped By The Beneficent Spider

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a return to Vanaheimr might prove to be both a beginning and an ending.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is where I have my inevitable weekly breakdown about this fic and confess that I am going mad. I've spent a good deal of time writing this fic feeling concerned about the fact that I just seem to be filling in gaps between badly-written sex scenes, but this chapter introduces the alleged PLOT and now I feel bad for not writing more peculiar excuses for porn. Er. WHY MUST I ALWAYS FAIL. **WHY.** But yes, the plot has finally emerged, and actually? I can safely say the story's going to be somewhere in the range of fifteen to sixteen chapters, as I now have a vague outline for the entire thing.
> 
> ...if it just doesn't implode and get tossed out a window in the next week or so, anyway.
> 
> At any rate, for anyone out there still reading along: _thank you_. I don't think you will ever know how much your support, whether through kudos or comment or just simply _reading my terrible words_ , really means to my tangled snarl of a brain. I love you. I love you. Thank you so very, very much.

The lone raven circles high overhead. Though he knows it as one of his father’s, Thor cannot not name it as Huginn or Muninn. At such a distance it is just a shadow, ever-watchful and too high overhead to see, let alone speak with. Yet Loki would have known. Loki could name anything, should he put his mind to it; it is one of the secrets of seiðr, he had once whispered in his brother’s ear. To name a thing is take power over it.

_What do you name me then, brother?_

_To me, you have no name_. A moment later watchful eyes had moved over him like over the words of an ancient tome, memorising everything he has to say and all that might lie beneath. _Between us, there are no names._

Thor shivers. At this time and in this place he _is_ Loki, in form and in voice, and yet still he cannot name even their father’s fetch.

The woman who rides at his side likely could likely do so, though he will not ask – for she, too, will know that this is information Loki would never need seek from another. Then she catches his borrowed eyes upon her, and smiles. Thor only just suppresses the urge to smile back. He doesn’t even know if she would find that surprising. He knows his brother has a respect for her, but that does not necessarily translate into any sort of fondness.

Her presence has already given Thor some difficulty, given he does not know her anywhere near as well as Loki presumably does. Thor has simply never spent so much time in her company. There has been no need; for all the quiver strapped to her back and the bow worn over one shoulder, Snotra is not a warrior goddess. Instead she is like many of her sister-kin. All those of Asgardian are born to war, to the blade and the bow and the ballista alike, but while the men ride out the women stay behind. It is no coward’s way. Rather, they guard hearth and home with all the ferocity of a bear roused from hibernation.

Though she wears not her perfumed gowns and floating veils, this still does not seem her place. Bound up in leather and metal plate, her hair scraped up in braids, to Thor’s eye she appears a stranger creature than even her usual wont. She’s always had a watchful age in her eyes, but the natural roundness of her features gives her a softness suited more to girlhood than the matron she names herself. The pale shimmer of her hair, too, could be either the fresh-born blonde of a young girl or the white wisdom of an aged crone.

Those searching eyes, light upon him now, are no better. While many shades of blue exist amongst the Aesir, it is rare for anything truly different to be seen. In certain lights they may appear otherwise, but the truth is that Snotra’s eyes tend more towards the violet than any actual blue. In the shifting light of the early Vanaheimr morning they deepen almost to inky indigo, and he must look away. Loki watches, he reminds himself. Loki does not stare.

His mount keeps easy pace with the phalanx of Einherjar sent to accompany the second prince and the lady to the oracle site. They ride together, not quite at their head. The arrangement almost feels like a scouting party – or perhaps, even, a subdued hunt that is merely riding to the killing fields rather than roused already. Thor wishes now they had insisted upon Hogun or Fandral being the lead; instead, the lean and rangy form of Ullr is their headsman. And though the way is known – as indeed many ways are known to his keen eyes – he and his hounds appear to be hunting out the path to the oracle site with grim purpose.

Again Thor shifts in his saddle, in his skin, and tells himself again that any lingering unease comes only from the knowledge of what memory awaits him. He does not doubt Loki’s power, he cannot; when they had awakened this morning, Loki’s exhaustion of the evening before had quite evaporated. Instead there had been easy sensuality in every movement as he had stood before Thor in nothing but his true skin and wrapped arms about him, drawing him close. Then, they had come: words of seiðr whispered across his skin, the tattooed pressure of wrought runes and power.

Opening his eyes, Thor had found the reversal of their positions dizzying; he in his brother’s skin, Loki in his own. It had been made all the worse when Loki had pressed his borrowed face between his own illusory hands and kissed him, fierce and longing, with fresh-worked seiðr tasting of the moon set aflame upon his lips. Then he had turned away. “Dress, brother,” and there came with it a light laugh more Loki than Thor even in his assumed voice, “we are required at the Bifröst before the sun rises.”

And when they had moved together to that place Thor had been unnerved not only by Loki’s appearance, but his skill in perpetuating the deception. Though he had always known his brother to be a fine actor – what accomplished liar was not? – Thor felt as though he truly shadowed himself. Few breaks in the façade had shown themselves, mostly in hissed asides meant for Thor’s ears alone – _brother, do not drag your feet! And even if you bow your head and cross your hands so, do not slouch, do not slump your shoulders; this is deference and not defeat!_ Then had come the parting, two false halves drifting apart from the truth of their whole.

And he is lonely now, even surrounded as he is by his kith and kin. Because Loki is gone from his side. They had clasped hands upon the Bifröst, in the fashion of blood brothers rather than lovers; wrist to wrist rather than palm to palm. After they had drawn apart, Thor had gone first. It had been peculiar beyond imagining to look back at the last moment and see himself left behind. He still feels now that he has left something in Heimdall’s Observatory, some great chunk of his heart that beats still, every contraction a shuddering ache in the rawness of the cool air of Vanaheimr.

Such sensation troubles him deeply. Thor has loved Loki all their lives together, and even before Vanaheimr he had never liked to imagine life without his brother. But the pain of this parting is deeper, harsher. And it makes him recall how before now, things had not been this way. Never before has he had this constant _sense_ of Loki’s presence, not in a fashion that means if he lets his mind go, he might just know exactly where Loki lingers. And never before has Loki been able to pluck his thoughts from his head like petals from a blooming flower, to scent and to discard as necessary.

 _Sif called it a binding spell_ , he thinks, haphazard and uneasy. _But how many ways are we bound?_

A moment later he realises his hand rest over his abdomen and he doesn’t know why; it is not as if Loki has passed the child to him along with his face.

“Are you unwell, my prince?”

The low question, sweet as spring honey, startles him. Smoothing it away – Loki is not the type to bear surprise so openly – he gives her an even look. “No,” he says, and then must clear away the odd break to his words. “No, my lady, I am quite well.”

Rather than quicksilver grace, his words are stiff unworked tin. The knowing smile that quirks at Snotra’s rosebud lips might have troubled him, if he had not known her for a goddess of wisdom. Turning his eyes ahead, he purposely loosens his fingers about the reins and squares his shoulders like any prince might do.

“You do make an admirable effort,” she says, quiet shadow at his side, “but he is the mummer of your family and you always the warrior. His glamour is clever, but to one attuned to such things Mjölnir sings forever true.”

Iron can be brittle, Thor reminds himself; it breaks before it bends. Still he speaks iron-hard, still he keeps his eyes resolutely to the path Ullr hunts for them. “I am quite sure I have no idea what you seek to speak of, my lady.”

“That was very good!” The childish delight of her words is aided by the way she claps her hands together, reins pressed between. “But I must tell you, for you might not have realised this, being so far into his confidences and his heart: usually he is not so irritable, so fast. Someone must annoy him further, before he will grant them that much scorn. He must truly care, to be as short-tempered as you are now.”

In the silence, Thor too can hear Mjölnir; she lies nestled in the saddlebag at his left, hidden from sight. The one upon Loki’s belt is a mere facsimile, only ever for show. It does not help that Loki told him that it would be better to leave Mjölnir behind.

_Is it not bad enough I need be separated from you, and not also my greatest strength?_

_Do not place so much value upon the external_ , he had chided, but had cast the charms all the same. And it seems they have failed them both. Now he turns his head, the elegant curve of ebony and ivory, to stare at Snotra. Even beneath that cool green gaze she smiles still. Thor wants to lie in the face of that easy openness. He is in possession of the silver tongue, after all. But then possession never guarantees the ability to master it; Mjölnir itself is much the same, and his hand tightens about a haft not in his palm.

“Did he tell you?”

“No. But he knew that I would know.” Her eyes hold a faint glimmer, both wry and amused. “Goddess of wisdom, yes?”

“Is that why you were chosen?” he asks, the abrupt demand more than of a god of thunder than a worker of tricks and games. “Because I do understand why Freyja was not asked to accompany Loki, for all she would know these things better than any other seiðkona, but how was it that _you_ came to be here now?”

It is now a blazing sparkle that lights up her peculiar eyes. “Am I not considered wise enough in your eyes, Odinson?”

And though she seems amused, he still feels shame for having spoken thus. “You are wise beyond words,” he admits, casting his eyes to the shining mane of his mount, “certainly beyond those as clumsy as mine own. I simply…”

“Who else might you have chosen?”

Her curiosity seems genuine, her offense untaken; he therefore lifts his eyes, looks about. They are far enough from the others that they can hear nothing even should the conversation continue, though Thor knows he was out of his depth even before it had begun. “Amora, perhaps?”

“Ah.” A small line appears on the smooth brow, the pink lips pursing together. “She was suggested, yes.”

Though Thor has never quite enjoyed the young noblewoman’s company – she blazes with seiðr in a way that many warriors find unsettling, like an untempered and half-forged blade that swings only itself in a laughing arc of destruction and death – he still must wonder at that. She and Loki have been acquaintances both uneasy and unsettlingly close for many hundreds of years, and he has always spoken well of her skill and knowledge. “She was found somehow wanting?” Thor asks finally, even as he realises that she likely would have seen through this glamour upon the very Bifröst itself.

“Loki did not wish her company.”

And Thor frowns; does his brother not trust even his oldest friend? “Loki knew he would not be coming.”

“And I believe he did not wish her company even upon you.” Amusement shines strong now, though there’s a watchfulness behind it that loops uneasy knots in Thor’s stomach. “They had a falling out, I believe.”

“That was an age ago!” Incredulous, Thor turns memory over in his mind, seeking out the nature of that half-remembered feud and finding it utterly vanished. “He cannot possibly still be furious with her over that…even I cannot remember what it was, that troubled him so.”

“If I might offer wisdom,” she says with an ironic tilt, braided hair moving like a tapestry over the mail of her shoulders, “it it not something you would easily understand.”

“What do you mean?”

His frown, dire though it might be, seems to have little effect upon her ability to speak truths as her heart knows them. “Should you and your brother ever find yourself in a position where old hurts just remake themselves anew with every touch, every word, then remember this – you forgive too easily, and he forgives never enough.”

Thor’s expression turns thunderous, and though it seems so often to rain on Vanaheimr he can feel the uneasy sky above coiling its clouds tighter, the very air itself darkening about them. “He forgives.”

“But never easily.” Her eyes flick up, and then down; her shrug is just the simplest move of rise and fall. “I am not trying to speak ill of your brother, your grace. It is merely something I would like to offer you while I have your ear.”

“My brother and I are joined in ways both deep and true. Mere misunderstanding could not tear us asunder.”

Despite his vehemence, Snotra is unmoved, the perfect roundness of her small face bisected by troubles Thor cannot hope to be master of. “Misunderstanding is perhaps one of the greatest instruments of destruction there is,” she murmurs, and says no more. They ride thereafter in silence, though soon enough the low murmur of the ranged Einherjar and the periodic calls of Ullr and his thralls to the hounds grates against his uneasy thoughts. He turns his head to the goddess, words falling free of his lips with a complete lack of guile.

“What do you expect we might find in this place?”

“What did your brother think we would find?”

Like a child she gives him her curiosity with easy grace, and Thor winces all the same. It is difficult to know of what he should and should not speak, given that Loki had said nothing of what was between himself and the goddess; considering Thor had not expected Snotra to realise so early their deception, he had never thought even to ask. Now he looks upward to the sky. The raven has passed on and taken its shadow with it. But their eyes are sharp and hearing sharper. They carry back all to the Allfather, and he knows that well.

Snotra follows his gaze; her words are low caressing pressure against his roiling mind. “Your brother will be at the very edge of the king’s great hall. He cannot be called back now, not without creating an incident.”

“Is that why you waited so long to reveal that _you_ knew?” he asks, looking back to her with raised eyebrow; she keeps her smile, and in that he is again reminded of Loki.

“I am wise enough to know your brother does things a-purpose,” she demurs, and Thor’s confusion only grows. Given the nature of Loki’s mind, it has been forever impossible for him to decide what happens because Loki has willed it so, and what happens simply because it does. Shaking his head, he thinks he may indeed never know.

“You are rare in that belief,” he offers instead, and Snotra’s first answer is a small chuckle.

“Tricks and mischief are but one method among many of obtaining the information one requires.”

In the face of this wisdom Thor falls into silence, again. “I do not know what my brother thinks we might see in this place,” he says finally, when his contemplation will take him no further; he only wears Loki’s skin, he does not know his mind. “I have the impression he thinks there is nothing there to be seen.”

“We have been told little of how you escaped your imprisonment.” Thor gives her a sharp look; the one she returns is whetted in a different way entirely, though it holds strong against his own. “Save for the fact that it was the work of both you and your brother together.”

“It was.”

Now that troubled expression returns, wide brow folded into deepening furrows. “Seiðr is not yours to work.”

“I am not entirely certain you could name it seiðr.”

With that parry Snotra’s eyes drift to the saddlebag where Mjölnir rests in wrapped silk and swaddling linen. When she nods, there is equal insight and folly in the movement. “You are both great strength, complementary and conflicting.”

“Conflicting?”

His anger is swift and sudden; when she turns to acknowledge it, her face is once again the wry wisdom that has been all he has known of this goddess for most of his life. “Come, now, of anyone you know how you have struggled with your brother in the past, and in the present. You will do so again in the future I do not doubt.”

He presses his lips tight together. “I care for his happiness.”

“And that is why it happens.” Gentle, now, Snotra straightens her back and calms her horse’s uneasy gait; it seems to be responding to the rising temper of the rider and his mount just beside them. “It is not a bad thing, nor necessarily is it all for the good – all force is neutral in its inherent state. For that, it can always be both, no matter how we seek to tame it otherwise.”

“I would never do anything to harm my brother.”

She does not answer, and in the silence Thor’s mind whispers for itself: _but what if you already have?_

For that, Thor has no further desire to speak with her, fount of wisdom and knowledge or not. He turns his attention instead to the high hills through whose valleys they ride, their tattered slopes clawing upwards into the ragged edges of mountains above. The encroaching dampness of this realm is so unlike the golden days of Asgard, the star-spun nights that sometimes seem to stretch on forever. This is a place of mist and mystery alike, the sky choked with cloud while the great binary star system that can be seen from the Bifröst keeps its two faces resolutely turned away. In this place the constants are the hum of river, the squelch of soil, the distant rains pattering in the distance.

The great fiords lie beyond the brooding mountains. Thor can imagine what they would be like; similar lie upon on the far side of Asgard, and he has hunted there many a time. But they are always welcoming. This place cares not for him, and he knows it as well as does the land itself.

They walk the path of their salvation in reverse. And again Thor is unspeakably glad that Loki is not here, for all it appears to be his body making the journey. Holding his head high, he will not let it weigh him down – and he knows long before Ullr calls back that they have found that which they seek.

The temple had been built into a great cavern beneath a grave mountain. Its cavernous entrance lies behind the tumble of a waterfall, and though it might be hidden from other eyes between Thor’s heart and Ullr’s divinity it cannot be anything but found. Hobbling the horses, leaving them with squires and two Einherjar, the rest of the party make their way inside. Ullr leads, the Thor-borne shadow of Loki barely two steps behind. Snotra remains at his side, silent and watchful. It gives him strange gladness. She is not truly like Loki, save for in the the most small and strange ways. But for while Loki does not trust easily, Thor must believe that he has some respect for their fellow goddess. Surely he would not have allowed things to happen in such a fashion had he not.

Yet his unease grows as they move deeper still. Thor had not been at all sure what to expect from such a return, and the memory of the days lost here lingers strong and heavy upon his mind. In Asgard he had been able to push them away in favour of what he had been gifted in return. He cannot regret Loki. He will never regret Loki. Perhaps it was inevitable, perhaps it would have come in a better way, but then he has to believe that this is better. Because now they will fight for it. It is what they both want and they can know that with the certainty of the battle they first began in this very temple.

The darkness yields before the blazing torches lit by the easy seiðr of Snotra’s small-fingered hands. The closer they come to the centre, a faint scent begins to work its truth on all their minds. But for all its growing strength it is something not a one of them will turn back from. All warriors know the flavour of death; they have all tasted it in their own fashion. And so they keep moving without second thought even as Thor dwells upon the last time he had walked between these walls.

They had not needed to pass through the great chamber again to make their escape. Loki had guided Thor back to their prison, and there Mjölnir had splintered the door to shards. Fandral and Hogun had borne Volstagg back, Sif’s long loosed hair flapping in the rising stormwinds as they had returned to the Bifröst site. Thor has never really considered it, but such action seems strange to him now. Why had he not aided his kith? Why had he simply walked at the side of his kin? Why does he scarcely remember it at all?

Then he remembers Sif, how she had spoken that day in the training hall.

_(“When you both came back to us, you covered in enemy blood with Mjölnir sparking in your hand and Loki with his entire body aflame with seiðr, all you said was that you had taken umbrage at what they wished of you. And that they had paid dearly for their presumption.”)_

_(“But isn’t that what had been happening the whole time? What changed **then**? What allowed you to become what you were?”)_

A shudder moves down his spine. None of them had come close, he thinks suddenly, not a one. Instead they had looked at them like they were become alien creatures, something strange and new and very nearly frightening. He’d not considered it much then, had thought it was just the shock of their salvation. Now begins to wonder if it had been something more, something darker that had led even his dearest friends to keep their distance in the earliest moments after he and Loki had worked the prophecy between them.

Thor keeps his silence as he moves ever closer to the central chamber. None of the others has commented on his relative quiet, though he does not think they know as Snotra does. It brings with it a vague sense of sorrow. Thor knows that for all his silver tongue his brother often keeps his clever words to himself. There’s something deep and unutterably depressing in that; Loki seems to thrive on his solitude, but Thor has never understood why. He himself has always been happier in the company of others, though his want these days feels narrowed to only one other in particular.

When at last they enter the chamber, Snotra keeps close to his side. A murmured word, and the lights blaze all at once to life. They are not the great candles Thor remembers from his dream, and suddenly he is disoriented, confused. When he thinks of it, such candles had _never_ been here – that he remembers. But he had only been in this place once.

The dead have never left. As he looks about, Thor does not know if that is a good sign or bad; they should have been consigned to water, or at the very least left to burn – although Loki had done some of that for them, given the fiery action of his unleashed seiðr. But no carrion animals have stepped into this place, seeking sustenance and reprieve from the eternal rains without. And though the blood has dried, the sickly-sweet scent of iron is strong while there is nothing of rot. In a way, it is as if time has stopped.

Turning, his unspoken questions fall upon Snotra. Her brow is furrowed as she looks around, but as if she feels his question she turns to meet his gaze. He cannot ask, not when Loki is known as a master of magic beyond not only what is proper, but what is even known to most of Asgard itself. But when she looks back, she understands.

“This is a place of deep magic. Unnatural.” Small hands move to wrap about her upper arms, as if to repress a shiver she will not show. “I fear it is beyond my knowledge.”

“Is there ought to find here, then?”

Her frown is confused. “Your grace, I cannot be sure, but their spirits have fled. Nothing remains of them here.”

His own nod is stiff. “Still, I would…examine this place, again.” The words taste of ash and iron upon his lips. “There was little time during our escape to make much sense of what they tried to do here.”

But it makes little sense to him, what coils and curls about his mind now. It is just an underlying unease, a sense of something terribly _wrong_ , for all he cannot doubt the truth of Snotra’s words. But even apart from this abandoned misused magic, there are deeper implications. Feeling it, Thor doubts such a group to have been working alone, and yet they have been abandoned to this strange state of non-decay for what might be forever. Being warrior-born and bred, he knows not for what reason such a thing would be done. Perhaps there was there no real magic here, not inherent – had it been just a space, just a place?

But even he can feel the hum of sorcery not yet dissipated as he walks towards the dais. A robe still lies there, blood-stained and torn. When he picks it up it unfurls from his hands like a house banner loosed to the sky: green and gold, with its patterns and whorls across back and arm and down to the floor. The realisation hits him with the force of a warhammer to the skull: they are the patterns of Loki’s Jötunn skin.

 _They knew_. Thor traces their embroidered ridges as he had traced them upon Loki himself, gorge rising in his throat. But then, of course they had known. If he thinks back now, they had taunted them both with the knowledge of Loki’s true parentage. Only Thor had been the true Odinson, and Loki the worthless cuckoo in the nest, with no young of his own to bear.

Letting the robe fall, he clenches his jaw. They had declared Loki to be of no value for whatever they had done to him here. But what they had wanted had not taken. Only in love could it be given, and in that he and Loki had seized back their freedom, and their fate.

Looking about the chamber again, to eyes unopened by experience or sorcery it might only have seemed a pile of broken stone. There are broken memories, too, but those are not easily seen. Running a hand over cracked marble, the action draws no blood save for in his mind. They had been awash in blood upon this very dais at its end, naked, he with Mjölnir in hand and Loki aflame with seiðr. Two halves, wrought finally in a distinct whole.

Thinking of the dream, he knows Loki had once been on his knees in this place as those greasy candles had burned with cursed scent and light; the watching eyes of the circle had been greedy upon his naked skin as the Vanir seiðmaðr had mounted him. A full body shudder rocks him now as Thor steps lightly over to the place of his dream, not knowing if that was how it had truly happened at all.

And now Thor himself goes to his hands and knees, borrowed and bruised though they might be. The murmuring of the distant others dims to almost nothing, but he pays them no heed. He has no care for anything but his own senses as his hands move over the blood-stained marble where he had first joined himself to his brother; where they had wrought between them life, and then something far greater still: the divine inevitability born of the synergy of two as one.

Yet Loki’s heavy gauntlets are as a barrier between flesh and stone. Impatient, Thor works them loose, pulls them free; his first instinct is to cast them far from what he does here, for all he does not quite know what that is. But Loki had cautioned him against discarding anything wrought with the glamour.

Then she is there at his side, wordless as she extends her small hands to accept them as if a goddess taking her votive offerings. To him, it does not matter; she offers wisdom enough in her silence as she withdraws. Then Thor pushes bared fingers against the marble, gritting his teeth though he doesn’t truly know what feeds this furious swell of passion. Certainly there is _something_ here, for all Loki had claimed he would find nothing in this place.

 _But he has ever been a talented liar_. And his teeth are grinding now. _Yet there is no reason for him to lie to me._

The words ring hollow in his mind, given he is now one of Loki’s lies made flesh. A dark fury rises still and it all seems to make so very little sense; nothing of this sensation belongs to him and yet he has never felt anything as true as all this. Fingers dig into the marble, flecks of blood coming away between short neat arc of Loki’s nails. With a screech of keratin against stone he rakes them down, sudden and violent, and sits up on his heels so swiftly he almost overbalances. But he holds his ground, he holds his silence despite the weight of eyes upon him. It is another who must speak first, words tendered with watchful hunter’s caution across the spaces between them.

“Your grace.”

“Yes?”

Even the great Ullr, who will taunt a snow bear out into the open in the name of a fair bout, takes his pause before he continues. “Is there ought of interest to you in this place?”

“Can’t you feel it?” There’s laughter bubbling up from deep in his chest now, and it’s not Thor’s own. The smile feels all wrong to his mind but it’s all right for the face he wears and Ullr’s bright eyes narrow in the fashion of fresh-sharpened blades.

“This place is cursed.”

“It will always be cursed.” Thor’s too-pale fingers scrape once more against the blood spilled here; in a peculiar way, despite the wane of the moon and the fact it has long dried, it still feels warm. “But by whose hand?”

“Your grace—”

“We should go.” Pushing to his brother’s feet too fast, Thor wavers. At least, that is the only reason he will accept. Snotra’s eyes on him feel as a mirror he will not look upon as he meets the huntsman’s eyes once more. “Yes, let us go now. We shouldn’t be here. _I_ shouldn’t be here.”

“Do you wish to return to the Bifröst site?”

 _I wish to go to my brother’s side_. Yet to do such a thing would only infuriate Loki. Thor knows this because he wears Loki’s skin and in that the mere thought infuriates _him_. The glamour is supposed to be only skin deep but in Asgard when he had touched himself he had felt everything as Loki did. In this place the uneasy sorcery that lingers is become a great crushing weight upon his chest, the air saturated with these magics he does not understand; yet he cannot filter them away, he cannot help but feel them in ways he never has before.

As Thor casts his eyes about the half-lit chamber his mind moves with his sight, thoughts all disjointed pieces rubbing close against others that do not feel his own. It’s like confusion, and yet somehow deeper, shot through with anger and frustration. Everything is a tangled snarl, for everything he feels is his own and _more_. And that seems wrong, because Loki said the glamour was only an illusion. He is still himself. But this is not his own emotion. Because he _hates_ this place in ways that crawl over his skin and then creep beneath, long claws closing tight about his heart while threatening to cut deep into his soul. This place gave him love, but that love had always been there, should not have been awakened in this way – and in that there comes a fresh hate birthed, in this place death where seems to stand still.

“It is not finished.” His not-hands clench into fists at his side, and though Thor remains on his knees with head bent low his strength only seems to grow with each passing moment. “No, it has only begun.”

An in that he hears the ugly twisting of the promise he had once made to Loki in this very place, and the curse of it burns like the half-gutted heart of a dying star.

“Damn you all.” Nothing will cleanse this place, save perhaps for fire. Thor yearns to go outside, to take Mjölnir from her swaddling cloth, and bring down the entire mountain and then set it ablaze. But he wants Loki by his side as he does it. He wants Loki’s seiðr pulsing through his palm as they bring the hammer down as one.

Thor closes his eyes again. Something strange, something odd moves him now, as if his limbs are not quite his own. The bitter taste in his mouth is so like that of the dream. Voices swirl about him like water one might drown in, and he is unable to come up for air. They have questions, but to his mind there is nothing more to say. Not when there are other voices, deeper and darker, moving forward from the shadows of the dead and not so gone in this damned place.

 _You are the mother of monsters_ , a voice whispers in his ear, _so what is it to you, to birth one more? And perhaps this will be the perfect one, the one that the Allfather cannot slave nor chain nor banish nor abandon to the deep depths of a realm not its own. This one shall know freedom, and in that shall make the prison to hold them all_.

“Your grace?” Confusion moves into swift concern. “Your grace!”

A hand falls upon his shoulder. Small and almost childish: it can only be Snotra who would dare lay hands upon him, he thinks, vague. Drawing a shuddering breath, his entire body seems to fight an unseen foe that is more within than without. He wants to stand. He wants to _fight_. But a weight is driving him forward, driving him down, his head moving towards the bloodied runes carved into the marble beneath.

_Oh, little not-prince of Asgard, you were brought to those golden halls for a reason. And in these marble walls, we shall make that reason truly flesh at last. The Allfather seeks to know how to bind your children, but this one will be born free._

“Prince Loki!” And then, a gasp of horror. Thor rises up once more, a scream tearing free of his throat, fury and frustration and the need to kill.

“… _Thor_.”

It bears no title. But it is not his name. It is the invocation of a god, a cry to the heavens, a summoning from Valhalla herself.

The glamour is gone, and Thor can feel the storm rising.

“ _Loki_.” Dangerous and low fury thrums through his veins; it is the promise of the berserker rage, something that has always been, will always be beyond his control. In its power Thor is a weapon primed, an arrow fletched with hate that is now nocked while the cord is pulled taut. He needs to let fly. He needs to take the enemy in the heart and bring them low.

Snotra stands before him, holding something out. It is foolish, such an action, to stand before elemental force in such a manner; from the gasps of those around, they know it too. Thor stares blindly, but he stops. Then, he sees: his own gauntlets as had once been Loki’s lie cradled in her hands.

“They are yours.” Her eyes are bright transparent violet, a bruised and furious sky. “Take them. Bear them. The battle is beginning.”

 _It began long ago_ , he thinks with sharp purpose, but he does so. Then, he turns, body coiled tight with the kindle rage that merely awaits the spark to set it to blazing.

“I will go to my brother now.”

Ullr cannot hide his continued shock, though he tries. “Your grace… _Thor_ , you—”

“If this world seeks to take my brother from me, I shall in turn take it apart from the foundations upward.” He almost wants to laugh, fingers flexing about the absent hammer whom he hears carolling to him beyond the walls of this cursed place. “I would go to the deepest roots of Yggdrasil herself and uproot all the realms if it meant his life.”

Grey now, Ullr is but a shadow before the blazing divinity of the first prince. But he stands strong, hand upon the hilt of his sword. “He is gone to the capital, in your place?”

“And now so shall I go. As myself. For him.”

Striding through the halls now brings with it the strong sense of having done so before. Lightning moves across his skin in the same way now as it had then, and he feels the storm within him yearning to be made free. Seeking sky, it prickles through muscle and skin and sings along every nerve; it is only natural for it to blaze all the brighter as he explodes into the daylight beyond the cavern. The shock of those waiting seems dull and pedestrian next to the pleasure of being once more out in the open. And then Mjölnir, singing, flies to his hand and he raises her to the sky which already rumbles with low brontide. This is not the heart of the storm, not here. There is yet further to go, before its true power can be known to all.

“Do you not go alone.” Snotra steps forward, wisps of hair working free from her braids and rising in the charged air about the first prince of Asgard. “Take me with you.”

From behind the red veil of his fury Thor sees no point in acceding to her request. Yet Loki has brought her here for a reason, and he sets his teeth. The sizzle of lightning strike rends the sky in twain, the sky overhead darkened and bruised even before it bears the great crash of thunder that follows. A moment later Thor pulls the goddess close and takes to the sky. She does not hold him. Even in this time and place she knows no fear. She is just a weight in his arms, knowing, watchful, waiting. It seems even to his mind that Snotra is simply wisdom held outside his own mind, there to be used when he has mind enough to think.

But there is no thought now, not in this. Thor does not even truly understand how he directs himself. He simply goes to where he knows his brother is. As he moves he thinks perhaps he catches the cry of a raven in his ear, keeping pace, and then he outstrips even its unnatural flight as he seeks the damned city where his brother’s glamour has presumably failed them both.

A glow upon the horizon now rises like a jewel before him, and there it is. But it is not that unnatural glow that brings him. A single figure lingers at its edge and to that his mind and heart go. Thor should not be able to see him so clearly from such a distance. But then he does not think he sees such things with his eyes.

Oddly, as he draws ever nearer, he thinks of the first time he had held Mjölnir aloft. Though he had been trained in such weapons before, it seemed not to matter. It had simply been a part of himself, as alien as it was familiar. And this is the same – something always within himself that he simply had not known before.

He brings them to the ground with the easy precision of a lightning strike. Immediately he lets her go, strides forward alone to the only one he seeks. Loki stands like a fresh-cast shadow, elongated and slender, hair loose about his face in the rising winds. The entire atmosphere about them both is alive with both heat and a preternatural glow, but not from within himself. It comes from somewhere else entirely. But Thor does not care. Striding forward his hands fall upon his brother’s shoulders, as if to see if he is real.

“It is me,” Loki answers, but it does little to alleviate the prickling sparking fury and fear that move along every singed nerve of Thor’s tensed body.

“The glamour failed.”

“I allowed it to drop,” he corrects, and there’s an arch amusement even to his unsmiling lips. “The situation changed.”

Thor allows his hands to fall, for even though his body cries out to press itself against the other before him, the goddess is watchful and he cannot think her wisdom stretches so far. _Why did I bring her?_ he wonders anew even as he speaks to Loki alone.“Where are the others?”

“On the other side of the city.” The wave of his hand is easy, the outspread wing of a dove taking flight. “I felt your approach, and so I came to you myself.”

“Alone?”

One hand rests a moment upon his abdomen. And then, it is upon his heart; his eyes are deeper than the well of Mímir, of even Urðr. “You are a fool, if you think I am ever alone.”

And again the siren song of a berserker’s blood rising rings true through his veins, his heart beating out a true rhythm of vengeance and death. Mjölnir rests now at his side, hung from his belt, but he wishes to hold her again. “Loki, where—”

“You needn’t worry for them. They are _fine_ ,” he says, almost seeming impatient with Thor’s devotion to his brothers-in-arms. Then, he pauses, rolls his eyes. “Oh, so I tell a lie. Fandral singed his beard, and was so distraught he took down three rebels with the single thrust of his hands upward in despair at what the maidens will make of him clean-shaven. We shall all suffer his melancholy until he can regrow it, I quite assure you.” Now he presses his lips together, one hand rising to work against his temple. “We should be glad Volstagg was not well enough to accompany us, _this_ likely would only have whetted his prodigious appetite.”

“And what is that?” Thor says, though he already knows that of which Loki speaks. He has been in more than enough battles to know, and though he has been attendant at only few funerals, he knows the pyre upon a longship and the scent of burning flesh below everything sweeter.

The city, the great gates closed though they are at Loki’s back, is ablaze inside its great stone walls. And Loki stands before it like the baker himself, silent as Thor finally asks: “What happened here?”

“A great battle.” Motionless, he lets his words work for him while he stands with hands clasped before his hips. Thor knows this stance as well as Loki does himself; he has stood so in many a council, many a meeting place, his eyes quick over the conversationalists while his silver tongue holds still. But in this, here, he is like an oracle: watchful and grave as he gives his pronouncements. “I was correct, as it turns out.”

Snotra’s voice is tight. “The king was a part of this?”

“Not exactly.” He turns to her with little surprise, though his words are near-careless. “Not that it matters.”

“Loki.” And Thor steps forward, seeing for the first time the blood upon the dark armour his brother wears. There is a sword at his hip, and while Loki does not favour the blade he knows how to use one. This is not a sword Loki would purposely choose for himself, however; it is heavy and broad, two-handed and thick. He had only worn it as a precaution, for Loki’s own weapons are tucked into pouch and pocket and would have been no use to him under his glamour. So instead he had carried a sword his brother might choose as he had carried his brother’s image, and Thor realises now he had drawn the sword, had drawn blood, and though they are born to war his heart twists in upon itself. “ _Loki_.”

“If you will allow me.” Snotra’s voice breaks between them, knowing and distant as she bows her head. “I would say a blessing for those passed, to see them on their way beyond.”

And Thor turns. She returns his gaze, violet eyes again darkened by the shadows of this place. He swallows hard. “Of course, my lady.”

Loki watches her go, a thoughtful look held across the mirror of his eyes. Thor just watches his brother. When she is some distance away, hands clasped before her breasts, head bent, Loki returns to Thor with one eyebrow raised. He seems undisturbed by the thought of any further attack, and Thor’s own senses feel no imminent threat. He lets out a low breath, hands clenching and unclenching still as he thinks of his brother in the heart of an attack, his only weapon to easy hand one he is not even suited to.

“I don’t know why I brought her here.” _Not when all I wish to do is push you down to the ground and fuck you senseless_.

Somehow Thor thinks that might be the very reason why, given Loki’s faint smile but true smile. “You told her?”

There’s no accusation to his words, but still Thor frowns. “She always knew. And _you_ knew that, didn’t you?”

His shrug is light. “Likely Father did too.”

“What?”

Loki has always taken delight in the reactions his actions might provoke; Thor should not resent the laughter he allows now, though somehow he does even when Loki curves closer. “Come, Thor, you mustn’t have believed even I could shield something as great as all that from both Heimdall and the Allfather.” Then he snorts, eyes shifting up, then down. “Particularly not with you blurting all the while beneath Huginn’s watchful eye.”

“So Father knew I was here and you were in the capital?” Again his fingers move to Mjölnir, seeking the strength she offers and augments. “Did he know what was going to happen here?” The rich delicious scent of roasting flesh turns his stomach further. “Did he…”

“I would not believe he realised the depth of the betrayal of the Vanir,” Loki replies smoothly, one hand moving fastidiously over the hilt of the sword. It rests there, palm curved about the bulb of its smooth hilt, as he frowns. “He believed the king, and by all accounts he was right to do so. It is not the once-king of Vanaheimr against whom this war will be fought.”

The blade will be clean of all blood, Thor knows, should he go there and wrench it free of its sheath. Loki is nothing if not fastidious. “You could have died.”

“So might any of us, until this is done.” With one last pass over the hilt Loki raises his hand, taps one long finger against his lips as he cocks his head. “What is this fear, brother? To fall in battle for the glory of Asgard is as noble a death as any of us might hope for.”

“It’s not my death I fear.”

He opens his hands, raises them to the level of his shoulders. “I am standing right here.”

“And should you go, I would follow to the gates of Valhalla itself.”

“ _No_.” Suddenly Loki is upon him, hands as vicious as the blaze of his eyes, as the pull of fingers raking through his hair. Jerking his head back, so close their lips might touch should either be able to move, Loki snarls: “Even you would not be fool enough to dare.”

“ _What_?”

“You would seek to dance with death just because it had taken my hand first?” There is both wild laughter and something else, something far more broken, just beneath. “Oh, you _fool_.”

“Loki—”

But for all Thor ought to be the stronger, in the face of Loki’s fury he has not even the strength of a child. Hair is yanked out by the root, fingers twisted in painful weave, but Thor cannot bear the thought of breaking away as Loki’s words beat against skin and mind and heart and soul. “I would bar you from Valhalla myself! Never would your rest be undisturbed, and your mead would be as poison while every morsel of food would turn to ash in your mouth.” He twists again, and Thor cannot stop a pained gasp. “There is no glory in such a death, and you shall not seek it in the childish pretence of otherwise.”

“I—”

“You swear it to me _now_.”

Thor gives only stunned silence, his brother a feral creature he cannot ever hope to name. Loki’s mouth twists deeper still, chest rising with sharp breath taken in from the burning air that twists around them both like alien storm.

“ _Swear it!_ ”

The scream cuts through Thor the way blades rarely do. It is the memory of the meeting in the weapons vault, when Loki’s skin had been Jötunn-blue and his eyes snapping crimson fire as took their father’s truth and burned with it. Thor swallows hard, the pain of his scalp nothing compared to that of his shredded soul.

“I swear that should you be borne to Valhalla first,” he whispers, eyes for his brother alone even as the words fall bitter from his lips, “that I will not follow for the mere sake of your company resumed.”

And his eyes are wet even though he scowls fit to disembowel the world entire. “You are such a fool.” The fury hardly seems to abate as he yanks free, golden threads dangling from his fingers as he half-turns, blindly steps away. “You understand nothing.”

Thor knows that. He’s known it most of his life, when it comes to the strange worlds that Loki walks that are beyond the knowing of most Aesir. Thor has never felt jealous of that; he has always had his own paths to take. But now, having felt the strangeness of that cursed chamber settle deep in his bones, the question explodes from him like loosed lightning. “What happened in that oracle site?” he demands, and then one hand points to the warmth of the baking city walls even as his voice crashes like thunder. “What happened in _there_? And how can you expect me to understand when you never tell me anything?”

“When we stood before the king, a rebel regiment came to kill you.” The casual tone belies the bloodbath Thor knows such action would have engendered from the seasoned warriors and adventurers who had surrounded his brother, and it curdles his stomach even as Loki smiles. “But by then I already knew. It was no surprise to me.”

“But it would have been to me.”

“And yet I knew it as soon as I entered the city.” He shakes his head, exasperation apparent. “They did not welcome us, you know. From the moment we crossed its threshold it was as silent as the grave. Why do you think it burns now?”

Even to his mind, it is a rich horror. Then his brother shrugs, light, and it burrows deeper still. “They did this?” Thor asks, stomach churning. “They overthrew the king, killed his people, and then razed what remained?”

“Oh, no. I did that.” At the look of horror Thor gives him, Loki laughs; it is loud, pulsing against the red-limned horizon of both realm and city alike. “It was a city of the dead, brother. Better it burn and bear them to their rest than remain standing, bastion for those who would stand against us.”

“I…I don’t understand. Why would you _do_ such a thing?”

Loki’s amusement flickers, gutters, dies away to ember; it sparks still in his eyes, but his voice is stone cold. “The whole city was made into a trap for you to walk into. And the king allowed it – both ours, and theirs.”

Thor’s fury wars with a terrible fear that cannot be easily allayed for all its greatest moment has long passed. Before he can think to do otherwise his hands close tight about Loki’s shoulders, shaking him like a woven doll made by their mother’s hands. “And so _you_ walked into it instead?”

Loki bears the violence with ease, eyes never leaving his. “Knowing what it was, yes.”

And in that he feels shame, though Thor cannot let him go. The scent of smoke is stronger, burning deep in nose and in mouth, tasting of feasts of long-ago; his eyes sting with ash, and he remembers again the feel of marble beneath his palms and his knees as it leeched blood it ought never to have given up again. “Why would they waste such a strategic location?” he asks, rough. “And why should _we_?”

“This is cursed land,” and the words shiver through him like an incantation; he gags, tasting grease-laden smoke, but he cannot let go, he cannot move back, and Loki is unmoved as he says with simple accusation: “Kinslayer.”

Even as his mind feels as though it moves between two realities, Thor seeks to remember the others of the Vanir ruling family. “This was the work of the king’s brother?”

“His sister.” He starts, but Loki bears no surprise, just a sense of the inevitable as he adds carelessly: “She took what she wanted, and left the rest. She had no interest in keeping this place. It means nothing to her, now that she has taken her revenge upon it. Now that she has made it bleed.”

“But…”

“Cursed land,” he repeats, and now his lips curve downward, hands moving upwards to rest lightly over Thor’s where they remain upon his own shoulders. “You know it as well as I do. Don’t you?”

And with that skin cool against his own, Thor calms – though only slightly. “You should not have burned it.”

“What use a castle without its king?” he returns, swift and sure. “ _Think_ , Thor. Or – _feel_. This place must be cleansed. Surely you know that. Surely you can sense that.”

And he can. That is the true horror of it. “But I do not understand what is going on!”

“I so shall I understand for you.”

His voice roughens, deepens, the raw rumble of the awakening berserker. “Then allow me to fight for you. If that is all I am good for, then do not disarm me. Let me have my blood and my glory.”

“This was but the opening gambit.” Loki shrugs, both the motion of shoulder and of his own hands plucking Thor’s hands free so that they might fall unneeded back to his sides. “The rest of the gameboard shall be yours to blaze across, now the players are here.” And long fingers move up to cup his cheek, his own smile sure for all that it is small. “Do not pout, brother mine. You will have your blood.”

And suddenly Thor knows desire like consuming flame; with that cool touch he is brought to burning inside. He wants nothing more than to strip off to the skin, and then strip _off_ his skin. And to Loki, he would do the same, until they are nothing but soul, until there exists between them nothing but the air itself – and then there would be nothing at all, safe the very molecules of their being twining into one.

“What is happening to us?” he whispers, and one dark eyebrow arches high.

“What do you mean?”

“I can feel you. All the time.” He has leaned forward quite without conscious thought, pressing his clammy forehead to Loki’s cool one, as if consumed by fever. “But it’s not enough. It’s never enough.”

“You want to be inside me.”

Though Loki has spoken simply, as if making a mere observation upon the weather, Thor’s groin tightens, cock already moving against the constraints of the armour he wears. “Where are they all?” he asks, low and harsh; Loki chuckles, palms pressed to the shining roundels of his chest plates.

“Coming. They are too close.” And for all they have done barely a thing in motion, in his mind Thor himself feels too close even as Loki now pushes him back. “You will need to wait.”

“I cannot,” he rasps, even as some more sensible part of his mind wonders at the insanity of it all; Loki’s eyes are dead calm as he shakes his dark head, though its ends are alight with the orange and crimson of the burning city at his back.

“You must.”

“You were never this strong.” The words are sudden, and Mjölnir’s leathers chafe against his palm as his hand tightens upon her haft. “You said yourself, the glamour that brought us here, it was beyond you once. It was beyond you before the chamber, wasn’t it? Before the…”

One hand moves anew, dips in low cradling curve about his abdomen, where it finds fresh rest. “My pregnancy heightens my seiðr, leaves it more volatile. More potent.”

“How is that?” Again, confusion leaves him feeling always the fool in the face of his brother’s quicksilver mind. “Because…it is a woman’s art?”

The answering glare is almost like an old friend. “ _Think_ , brother – a mare has more stamina in the first months of her foal’s gestation. Why should we, gods though we might be, be any different?”

“Has this always been true?”

“Yes.” And his hand moves, again, dips lower in teasing arc. “A mare may be ridden harder, faster in such a state.”

Thor’s step forward is heavy, very nearly involuntary. “And I would ride you.”

“Always you would,” he says, and though he smiles once more an upheld palm stops Thor dead where he stands. “We have not the time, we must return to Asgard.”

“Without you, there would be no Asgard worthy returning to.”

Loki’s snort is low, like a dragon who has not been roused enough to truly wish to breathe the fire that coils in the hollow of its throat. “I really must have Bragi teach you something about poetry, Thor. Or else just save us all the horror and drown you in Kvasir’s enchanted mead.” But his hand is tight and true for all his teasing, closing about his brother’s as he all but drags his unwilling form from the hypnotic scent of flame and city. “Come. Your kingdom awaits.”

He looses his hand long before the others arrive: both Ullr and his hunt, then the Warriors Two, Sif, and those who had gone to fight with one prince only to be led by the other. Their reunion is brief, their ride back to the Bifröst hard – and then, that is when things become all the stranger still.

Loki has not been granted to gift of prophecy. And yet it seems it has touched him this day. _Your kingdom awaits_ , he had said just hours before. There is foresight in that, for they return to chaos: Odin Allfather has fallen to his Sleep, and now war is truly declared between the realm of the knowing and the realm of the golden ones.

And as Thor accepts Gungnir with numb hands both ravens circle overhead as they stand in uneasy tangle upon the rainbow bridge between Asgard and her gateway. He listens to them crow of all they see and hear and know, and wonders why it seems as though his mind is filled with nothing at all.

Then Loki smiles and in that moment it seems he, at least, knows everything.


	7. These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there are dreams and not-dreams, and a return home only leads one further still away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First, I have to apologise for the lateness of this chapter. I usually try to write the bulk of a chapter's outline over the week and then fill in all the detail over the weekend, but...I had a major meltdown over the fic as a whole and just couldn't bear the sight of it. So I ignored it in favour of writing some other nonsense, and then finally came back to it now.
> 
> I'm...still in two minds about it. In a lot of ways I feel like I've lost control over it, but considering I had so much of it already written I figured I had to finish this chapter and see how things went from there. So...here it be.
> 
> Again, I apologise for what follows. I just wish I could give anyone still reading this stupid fic something decent that they deserve to read, instead of the rubbish I've written.

The rise and fall of a hammer, beating against flesh and stone. The endless mountains, veiled in perpetual rain. The cry of victory, rising ever above the scream of the dying.

In all these things, Thor is alive with the fight. Thor is the storm, and he is come.

And his might is all that matters.

Another day’s end, and the horizon is burdened with the fall of the sun barely seen between cloud and the mountains waiting to swallow it whole. Deep in the heart of the camp Thor takes the bowl handed to him by his squire and upends it over his head, eyes closed as rivulets of blood and sweat and cool clear rainwater move over brow and cheek and pool at the vulnerable hollow of throat and neck.

When the second is brought, he is less animalistic. With the harsh lye soap to hand he washes the blood from between finger and nail, and then he turns to Mjölnir herself. Only when the uru of her planes and runes is cleansed and shining does he return to himself. The cold matters not as he strips to the skin, using the next offered bowl to sluice away mud and gore. Yet the truth of war remains with him, even as his hands swipe over aching muscle and vague wound: Thor will never be clean again and he knows it. He is a warrior, blooded long ago, and such stains are not to be taken away. Instead they remain tattooed into his skin, forever memory of what he was born to be.

When he has donned light clothing, swathed himself in a great cloak of a bear taken to the south during the first week of the campaign, his squire returns. “My king,” he says, eyes low, a platter with two chalices held between his hands, “the reinforcements have arrived, and you have a visitor.”

Thor feels a faint skip of hope, though he knows it to be pointless. “Send him in.”

Taking a long draught of the mead of one cup, Thor waits for his company. The figure that enters is not lithe and lean. In fact all is to its opposite, this arrival’s body expansive as his personality. In anticipation Thor sets the mead aside; it is all to the good for once he has shouldered in, and for all his hand is extended as if to clasp, he embraces Thor instead with crushing gusto.

“Volstagg,” he says as he pulls back, smile large and deeply true, “it is good indeed to see you, and to have you once more amongst our ranks!”

“I just hope you’ve left some enough for me to kill.” Beneath the booming laugh his tone is light, though they both know their battles have barely begun. “I bring word to you of movements of the Vanir rebels, and fresh news of the others about their work to the south-east and the north.”

“Is there anything of my brother?”

“Loki?” Volstagg’s ruddy brow furrows, though Thor cannot say if it is for the question itself, or for the urgency of demand with which Thor had spoken. “To be true, I had wished to speak with him before I took my leave of Asgard. But it was not possible.”

His voice turns to storm and sword. “He is ill?”

“No. No, not that anyone knows of.” Reaching for his own cup, Volstagg drains it to the dregs, looks about to summon the squire for another. “But you know how he is.”

“What do you mean?”

The sharpness of those words brings surprise to Volstagg’s eyes. Mead temporarily forgotten, he passes a hand over his eyes, gives a helpless shrug. “He spends much of his time in research and enclave with other sorcerers. He is determined to make use of all the resources to hand – and the Allfather’s vault is a vast repository of such things.” He squints at Thor now as if perplexed by Thor’s irritation; they speak, after all, of his brother and shadow. “Loki has always been too fascinated with that place. Looks as though finally it might be to our benefit, too.”

 _Loki has always been a **part** of that place, in his own way. _ Thor can barely repress nor hide his shudder, and attempts instead to cover it with irritation. “He should have sent word with you to me.”

Volstagg just blinks. He has ever been the jovial one, and never has he understood the brotherly discord that has arisen between his princes in the past. “I have his advice and his good counsel.”

“He should come to me himself.”

Thor has turned his face away, torn between annoyance and acknowledgement of the right of Loki’s ways, even before Volstagg says almost with bewilderment: “With all due respect, both king and heir should not be here together.”

It is the truth of it, but still Thor’s hand curls about the stem of the chalice. Had it not been ward-stone, he might have crushed it betwixt his tightening fingers. “Had my father ridden out to war, I would have been by his side. How is this any different?”

“He…”

“Yes?”

Volstagg looks gloomy, as if he has stumbled into a room he thought to be a feast hall and has found only empty plates and chalices before empty seats. “Your brother is where he needs to be,” he says finally, slowly, a reluctant student before a harsh tutor. “Where he is likely happiest, as well as strongest. Is that not better?”

Again Thor turns away. _He cannot be happy. I am not with him._ His own unhappiness is strong, acidic against tongue and heart. And he shakes his head, pushes it aside. Loki will do as he wishes. And Loki wants this war to end as much as any other – more, perhaps. “Leave it for now. Come, take further mead with me, and a meal; the food shall not be anything like what you have left behind, but you will become accustomed to it again in short order, I am sure.”

Volstagg’s laughter is relieved, and loud. “I would eat anything laid before me and you know it.” Still, when he takes his place at the table strewn with maps and weapons, his great voice lowers with thought. “He misses you.”

“What?”

“He’s not one to wear his heart on his sleeve, perhaps,” the elder offers with wry wisdom that comes only with age, “but then his heart has legs to walk around upon.”

Something twists in Thor’s own heart, almost like one of Loki’s double-bladed daggers. “Let us speak, then, of what intelligence my brother has brought us.” Food is brought, and others are called. The twilight moves to dusk and then full dark in the way of councils and commiserations and congratulations. When the plans are laid out and orders given it is far later than he had intended, but in war fortunes turn upon a moment.

Thor has gambled at his brother’s side enough times to know how to guard a fortune against loss and trickery – or at least, to know that his brother can cheat his way past any bluff one attempts to play against his quicksilver lying mouth.

When all is done Thor leaves his tent at Volstagg’s side, embracing his old friend before he moves to take his own rest. He does not immediately return to the warmth and dry within. Instead he stands in his bearskin with the fine mist of Vanir’s perpetual rain settling upon him like dust of diamonds, eyes upon the brooding horizons not visible in such darkness.

His squire shifts uneasily at his side. “You should sleep while you can, my prince,” Þjálfi says. “We will be on the move again all too soon.”

Without answer Thor instead to the sky. The raven no longer in sight. It had been Huginn sent to watch his path, Loki had assured him. And within the tent even now Geri lay curled at the foot of his bed, yellow eyes ever-watchful. They remind him somewhat of the golden once-eye of the Allfather himself, but then he is as much a part of his fylgjur as they are of him.

But it is not dark wings he searches for. Loki rarely wears the form of a raven, knowing how it is their father’s familiar. Instead he is more often a raptor, great bird of prey; he glories in the possession of sharp eyes and talons, in being death in light bones waiting and watching from a distance, ready to strike from high above those unsuspecting upon the ground. Thor hears the shrill cries of such creatures, and he pretends it as how it has been so many times in the past – Loki, casting a shadow from high above, knowing his brother walks within its darkness below.

But it is night and all is shadow. He cannot feel Loki, and he knows it is not so, not now.

To Þjálfi’s relief Thor does return at last to his makeshift bed in the tent. Rolled in furs, the warmth of a great wolf laid out the length of his body, he thinks he should be grateful: both for the creature’s presence, and the assurance of his father’s ever-watchful eye even in his sleep.

Yet as he closes his eyes and lets his body over to rest so that battle might again be raised in the morning, all Thor truly wants in the night is Loki.

 

*****

 

Golden light streams over the bed like the press of warm fingers. The screams have gone, those that wracked through Thor as though they were his own – but they were a thousand times worse than his own, because all they were to his body was sound. Merely hearing them with his own ears did not take away the pain, could not ease the agony of his brother’s suffering.

The morning and afternoon had all revolved around Loki labouring over his swollen belly, so great with child – and he suffered for it. The injustice of it had burned almost as deep as Loki’s agony. From daybreak to this, the day’s end, Thor had wanted nothing more than to bear that pain on his behalf. But no miracle had answered his call, and despite his increasingly desperate demands no-one spoke words of seiðr that might transfer pain from one to the other. Instead he had moved willingly into the punishment Loki’s body could offer: flailing hands, fists, nails raking into his skin, and the curses bitten out between breaths and shrieks. It had not been enough. Not even the breaking of his heart, each crack working deeper with every sobbing breath, could punish him enough for what he had done to Loki.

But his brother lies still, now: a dreaming state, his body gone strange and languid. Thor would be afraid, if not for the easy smile on their mother’s worn face. Often Thor has seen such behaviour in warriors fallen upon the battlefield, in the moments when they accept their calling to Valhalla with open arms. But in this, it is not death – rather it is life, welcomed with opened arms.

“Come, my child,” Frigga whispers, and Thor knows not to whom she speaks – her sons, or the child yet idling within Loki’s body. She is between Loki’s legs, white arms glistening with blessed water; Eir moves closer at her side, watchful eyes in a creased face intent upon their work.

Behind them stands Fulla, her long hair pulled back by a golden spiral, eternal and shining, her arms filled with the birthing blanket Frigga had woven upon her own womb. Thor remains at his brother’s side, one eye half-closed from the fist that had struck it when the sun reached its meridian. But he feels no pain from it, even now. Not with Loki’s hand seeking his, fingers closing. The grasp is not weak. It is _strong_ , so very strong. Then he turns his head, forehead beaded and hair drenched with sweat. For just a moment he is there, again: smile upon his lips, a whispered word upon the air.

Then he returns to the ages-old song of his body, the womb that has cradled life so long at last giving up its treasure to the world beyond. The time is both long, short. Nothing of it makes any sense. Then it all narrows to a perfect single point: a cry to the heavens, born upon the world.

The child is born and Loki’s eyes slip closed and Thor lowers his head to his face and whispers even without having seen him: “He is perfect.”

Loki shivers, somehow both cold and warm. “He is yours.”

“He is ours.” Raising his face, cheeks damp with both sweat and tears, he smiles. “Forever.”

Loki’s eyes are too large in his weary face. And he says nothing. They simply fall closed again, and his face rolls away. Thor backs away, alarmed, turns in rising panic. “Mother!”

“Hush, Thor.” She glides close, hand upon his forehead even as Eir works below, and Fulla carefully cleans the child of its journey into this realm. “He must sleep, a while. It is has not been an easy birth.”

“But…he will…”

“He will not leave you. Not now.” She pauses, and though she had dipped them to cleansing waters before coming to Thor’s call, her hands are bloodied yet. “Likely not ever.”

With those words Thor senses a sadness in her that he does not wish to think on. Instead he looks away, looks down. It is not yet over; Loki wakens long enough to pass the afterbirth, says nothing else before closing his eyes once more, going very still. He feels dreadfully cold beneath Thor’s hands. When Eir moves to press cloth over brow and cheek, throat and chest, Thor takes the bowl and does it himself. A wife will dress her husband in armour, and then do the reverse for him when he returns. This is the least Thor can offer, after the battle Loki has fought this day.

But even when he is done, Loki remains silent. A soft snuffling cry rouses him from his half-held thoughts, and he looks back. The tiny child lies still and quiet in the arms of his grandmother, and when Frigga looks up there are tears gathered like translucent pearls at the corners of her eyes.

“Would you like to hold him?”

The fear is as sudden and electrifying as lightning strike. He actually moves back, hands rising as if in defence. “I don’t know how.”

“I am sure you will learn.”

And with the child in his trembling arms Thor feels like he is learning anew how to live. Counting tiny fingers, tiny toes; once, twice, thrice – then he starts to lose reckoning of often he has counted, though the number always remains the same.

Unlike its mother, the child is awake. The watchful eyes shine blue and curious, though his mother says it is always the same for newborns. His hand skirts so cautiously the soft curve of a head that fit his palm entire; apparently he had been the same, birthed with no hair at all. “And Loki, too,” Frigga offered with faint smile. “I did wonder, if he ever he would have any.”

That simultaneously hurts and gladdens his heart; she had not carried Loki, but she had known him well from almost his very beginning. Her second born child, as precious and dear to her as any other.

And this their first. Again, the count of fingers, the low soft lullaby of number and wonder.

“Brother, _how_ often do you plan to do that?” Thor starts, looks up to find Loki staring at him with clear irritation through even his great exhaustion. “For if you intend to start again, please fetch me the poppy draught, for I wish to go elsewhere in mind if not body while you indulge yourself in foolishness.”

Waspish as it was, Thor could not help but hear the wonder behind it. “Look!” he says, and he trembles as he stretches the infant close. “Behold, is he not wonderful?”

One hand rises, a single finger light upon the clear pale brow. “I am his mother, how could it have been otherwise?”

“He will be a great warrior.” His earlier uncertainty quite forgotten, Thor holds the baby with hands spanning its middle in overlapping fingers and thumbs, sets him upon his feet at Loki’s side. Moving him backward, then forward, he beams at his brother. “See? His form already is unparalleled.”

“Thor, he is scarcely the morning born. You cannot begin his training now.”

“It is never too early.” He tilts his head, gives the child a curious onceover. “Perhaps we will start with—”

“ _Mother_!” Loki tries to sit up, fails; when Frigga looks over, he half-waves a hand at Thor. “Your son is a fool and I am too weak to smack him as he so righteously deserves. Will you not save my child before Thor tries to teach him to bury a war-axe in the table before he even feeds first?”

She just shakes her head with a smile, goes back to conference with Eir. Thor draws their son back to his chest, fresh question to mind. “How…how _will_ he feed?” And even as the child snuffles happily against his heartbeat, it stutters as he looks again to Loki’s pale face and motionless form. “And what is wrong with you? I thought…are you unwell?”

“I have just given _birth_ , Thor. Do try to be more sensible.”

As if reacting to his mother’s tenderness of temper, the child goes suddenly stiff in Thor’s arms. Then: a cry that cut through him unlike any other blade he has ever known. As it spirals higher, he is only left all the more helpless.

Then Fulla is at his side. “I will take him,” she says, gentle; already she is freeing one breast, the baby sure in the crook of her arm. Thor watches, then turns to Loki with confusion burning deep.

“Do…do you not wish to feed him yourself?”

“It would be impractical,” he states flatly. But there is a yearning to his gaze as Fulla takes her place in a windowseat, giving the child a view of all Asgard as he sups his first meal. “I would have to maintain a feminine form at all times.”

“And you would not do this for your child?”

Beneath his draw brows, his eyes go very dark. “This is for _you_ ,” Loki says, voice gone very cold. “For the realm of which you are king.”

And he does not even know exactly what he has done, only that it was very very wrong. “Loki…”

But Loki allows him to rest his palm upon his cooling brow, eyes falling shut. “Let me rest, a while.”

There is nothing more to say. Thor remains close at his brother’s side as Fulla feeds the babe, while Eir and Frigga finish their work. The, Fulla returns the child to Frigga, who gently places the slumbering infant in Thor’s arms.

“We will leave you alone, to come to know your child.” At the sudden panic in his eyes Frigga gives a soft laugh, pushes his damp hair from his forehead to press a warm kiss there. “We will not be far, should you need us.”

“I will always need you.”

Still she smiles as she leans over to give Loki, too, that kiss upon his brow. Then, in a whisper of skirts, she is gone. Thor is alone save for the child in his arms, the brother in his birthing bed. Both slumber, the child curved in Thor’s arm and Loki curved around his now-flattened belly. The dark hair is damp still, though he has been cleaned, changed, left to his rest in fresh linen. The strain of the birth remains writ upon him, dark shadow on white.

_Perhaps death does not truly hurt, not if life brings as much pain as all this._

The decision is made utterly without thought. Rising, Thor carefully sets the babe down upon the clean linen. Then he lies down himself; with legs tangled together, hips apart, foreheads close, he makes one half of the heart his brother completes. Their child rests silent, held in the hollow between the heart their bodies, entwined at head and tail, make.

Loki stirs even as the bed ceases its movements, opens his eyes with bleary confusion. “Thor?”

“Go back to sleep.”

But he is only wakening all the quicker, looking about with wary curiosity though the majority of his body remains still. “What are you doing?”

“Sleeping.”

“You can’t.” One hand moves, a long finger poking him in the centre of his forehead. “Someone needs to look to the child.”

“He’s right here,” he protests, great hand coming to lie gently upon its swaddled rump. “Safe beneath the eyes of both mother and father.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Because, Thor, you great oaf, this is not, do not, will you not, only just _stop_ —”

With Thor’s hand over his mouth, he can do little but stare with furious eyes above the line of his elder brother’s smallest finger. “Yes, brother. The world shall stop with us at its centre…and then it can spin on regardless because we are here, together. And nothing else need matter ought.”

And of course when Thor removes that hand, all Loki can do is roll his eyes and let his tongue wag. “You are a fool.”

“I am _your_ fool.”

“And more fool me for having you.”

But Loki lunges forward, and his kiss is strong and true and desperate. There’s a small startled sound from the child, and when Thor places a gentle hand about his small middle he is shocked by the strong fingers that promptly close about his own. But then he laughs into Loki’s mouth, draws back with an easy smile. Night is falling, but it is warm against his skin. The song of the aurora over Asgard is strong tonight, even as Thor closes his eyes, and sleeps at last.

 

*****

 

It seems endlessly cruel, to be dragged back to reality from such simple happiness. As he lies in his furs, Geri stirring at his side, he feels it to have been less a dream, more a memory. Of times not even yet passed. With a frown Thor passes a hand over his eyes, then holds it there. Is this what it is, to be an oracle? Is such bitter happiness the true weight of prophecy?

He grimaces again. It should then be a boon, for if it had been as such then he now knows his own safety, and Loki’s – and that of their child. Their son will be brought to cradle in the great birthing-chambers of the palace at the heart of Asgard, with Frigga’s knowing hands gentling the road their son must travel alone for all they will be there to guide him, to await his safe arrival.

Rising to the war, Thor nods – to himself, and to the task before him. This is not a place for bringing of life. He wonders if that is why he dreams of the life he’d left behind, the life he’d left within his brother, even as his own divine life wrought death in return for the preservation of all they held dear.

But for all the glory and the pleasure he might find in giving himself over to the truest of all his selves, in a way Thor can never truly accustom himself to death. Even knowing the warriors would be borne to Valhalla, even knowing the great cycle of Ragnarök and the turn of the realms upon it, almost in the fashion of an unknowing child he ever mourns those lost.

_Is that why Father fears this child so? It is not Ragnarök he threatens, but instead the downfall of the world Father has spent so long in building, in preserving? Is it more than that?_

Such thoughts dog him always in these days of war. It does not dampen his skill or his lust for battle as he leads his men forward, but some of the shine seems to have gone from the drawn swords of his comrades. As little as three, four moons ago Thor had yearned for war of such magnitude. In Asgard, with nothing to play at but word of wars long past, he had been without purpose; in contrast Loki had always seemed content with his shadows, measuring out his days in spellcraft and fresh knowledge. Thor had only his hunts, his training, the ranged missions through the realms as he waited…for what? The opportunity to prove himself, perhaps. He had been as a sword in endless pressure against a whetstone, almost afraid that should he be sharpened too often and too well that when battle at last came he would be unsheathed and there would be nothing left to fight with.

They move onwards, the splinters of the great Asgardian army arrayed about the places Heimdall has seen with his ever-watchful gaze; the places where Loki and those gathered about him, rich in seiðr and sorcery, sense the movements beyond the physical. They are not losing, but even as they move Thor feels they stand still. They are not winning either. This is all grapple and hold, and as yet no side shows any true sign of falling.

At the end of each day even Thor’s great divine body sags with exhaustion, though he never sleeps well. Often instead he spends the night in company of those at the watch. This night is no different in that he yearns for companionship – and yet he is alone. The company of his guardsmen and warrior-lords and brothers-in-arms will not settle the aching need of both spirit and body this night.

It is the need for _touch_ that maddens him, drives him to near-distraction. With the thick cloak again about his shoulders, fur rough against the too-long rasp of his own beard, Thor closes his eyes and turns his face to the sky. The raven has not been seen this day, but still he thinks of Loki upon their father’s throne, flanked by Muninn and Huginn alike. Gungnir will be in his clever hand, the thick golden shaft held tight as he in turn holds his brother’s realm. He is ever-watchful. He is waiting.

After a battle blood still runs high and hot amongst the camp. There are ways of working it free, and Thor has no doubts or illusions as to how it can be done – of how others will be doing it even as he stands here alone. But the only person he wants waits beyond his reach.

When he opens his eyes again he cannot help but search the sky one more time. Nothing is there. The truth is that he has not had direct word from his brother in almost a full turn of the greatest of Vanaheimr’s three moons. All that has come to him by raven and by messenger are missives in his clear and careful diplomatic hand. Such instructions and information are nothing like the looped scrawl that he uses for his own notes to kith and kin. He writes only as the regent to his king, giving his advice and counsel as easily as he gives words to air.

Eventually Thor moves inside the tent, nodding to the young squire within as a matter of dismissal. The great wolf pads out with him, and Thor is utterly alone. Upon his back, he knows this is both what he desires and dreads. In the distance he can hear the low murmurings of the camp, still in constant motion though it is languid now with so many in the deep sleep of the well-used. Thor remains wide awake, staring upwards. There is nothing to be seen through the canvas, and yet still he seeks.

Then the murmurings grow louder. The flap to his tent opens, though Thor does not look up. The squire would have let few pass without direct permission, and this step is light and purposeful across packed earth. He would know her anywhere.

“I saw your light still burning.”

“So, have you come to scold me to sleep?” At first he debates the effort of sitting upward; then, the courtly manners drilled into him by his mother since babyhood push him to his feet. Giving a low nod, he adds with light irony: “How wifely of you.”

“I pity the unfortunate woman who becomes your bride.”

The half-humour of that prickles across his skin like the warning approach of lightning strike. Still he smiles. “Pity doesn’t become you, Sif.”

“Since when do I care what becomes me, other than sword and shield?”

And she’s smiling too, face framed by the fall of her gleaming dark hair. Even now Thor remembers well the shine of the blonde, like wheatfields in full noon sun. Underneath his wordless stare she is unimpressed, one hand upon her hip beneath the great cloak she wears, damp with the constant rain.

“If you are not going to sleep, then at least come join us. It’s not like you, to brood alone.”

His own humour evaporates entirely now, and he sits down heavily upon his bed. “I would not be good company.”

“Who is, in these times?” She raises her hands, begins to braid her hair even as she scowls at him. “Come, Thor. Be with those who will at least share your spirits, if they cannot raise them.”

“I do thank you, Sif, but I will remain here.”

Rising again, he crosses the packed earth of the floor and retrieves a carafe of wine. Yet he has no care for it, and sets it aside. Taking his chair before the spelled fire, he lowers his head to his hands.

“It would be best to let me be.”

It is rare for Sif to so consider her words. But it is not unexpected for her to expel a sharp breath, impatient and exasperated, before she strides close to stand at his back.

“Then at least let me do this for you.”

The subsequent movements come nearly in violence; the working of her hands is no gentler than either her tongue or her sensibilities. Thor cannot contain a groan as her strong fingers work into the muscle of shoulder and neck and back, seeking out and striking deep at any tension she finds.

“You must _rest_ ,” she says, punctuating each word with brutal knead. “You have fought harder than any other. While it improves morale, to have the warriors see their king amongst them, you need not always be at their head. We must still have a king at the end for the kingdom to hold true.”

Thor groans again under her ferocious ministrations, but arches neck and spine into her hands all the same. “The true king lies in Asgard still,” he points out, and hisses a sharp breath as she encounters the still-healing ribs of the day before. “I am merely play-acting my father’s place. I am but a prince, truly.”

“Thor. At this moment, you are Asgard.”

With a snort he leans his head back, closes his eyes. “I am not even upon her throne.”

“But you carry its burden with you.” Leaning her weight forward, she presses hard; he groans again, and her voice is tight with half-concealed annoyance. “No matter how you protest, how you fight, you will not shuck such truth off and away.”

Again Sif works her emphasis and her meaning into the hard over-taxed muscles that lie over shoulder and angle into his arms. With his head back still his hair brushes low past the knob of his spine; when did it get so long? And it is damp still. But then everything in this place is damp, the rains of Vanaheim so constant and so true. The misted fur of Sif’s own cloak puddles at her feet as her hands impatiently tug at the collar of his thick robe, pulling it back, pulling it down; her fingers press strong and warm against his skin.

He softens into it as the muscle relaxes, surrenders to the bone-deep weariness beneath. She is not wrong. Divine spirit of war and thunder or not, he has fought too many battles too early. He need not be in the midst of every skirmish, he need not lead every engagement. But he feels he must. God of Thunder, God of War; in both he finds identity even as he loses something more, the part of him that feels bereft and stripped bare with the loss of another self.

Fingers thread through his hair, working against his scalp. With his eyes closed he moves towards something that could not quite be called sleep; he knows he will fall too deep for it to be named as anything so simple. But beneath those constant hands he is calmed, feels comfort. It is as though he can pretend he is not here, that this war is but the ever-dream of his warrior soul – and when he wakes an entirely different world will swallow him whole.

The soft press of lips against his is welcome sensation, faint heat and the taste of fine wine. At first he arches upwards, forwards. Gentle hands work into his hair as his mouth opens, accepts, and then—

_Loki is not here. Loki sits upon the throne of Asgard. And here you are the one who wages war for the child he will bear you._

Pulling back, he finds Sif before him, brow furrowed. Yet she does not draw away from his widened eyes. Instead she nods, her own eyes heavy-lidded and somehow melancholy for all the careful smile upon her lips.

“If you need someone to stay with you tonight, Thor,” she whispers, “then I will stay with you as long as you need me to.”

He cannot pull away, not with her between his knees and the high back of the chair against his spine. With more courage than it would take to face down a bilgesnipe, Thor keeps his gaze steady. “That won’t be necessary, Sif. I will be fine.”

Her body sways closer, the hard muscle and soft curve of a woman used to doing battle for what she wants. “Truly, I can stay.”

“Sif,” he says, raising his hands and closing the fingers about the bare upper arms, “Sif, it…would not be wise.”

“I know my limits, and I know yours.”

“I am not certain you do.” For the first time doubt begins to cloud her expression – and he knows not if it is for her own actions, or simply her king’s sanity. With a grimace, he tries again. “Sif, I respect you. You are my friend and my comrade and for the sake of all between us before and now, I will not dishonour you.”

Her mouth works through a simultaneous action of frown and laugh. “It is hardly dishonour if I want it. I know what you have and have not to give.”

Something in him wants to laugh for the absurdity of all this. In that, he might have stolen something of Loki’s own soul. “I have very little to give anymore.”

“Thor, it is company—”

“I will not dishonour you,” he repeats, “and neither will I dishonour the promise I have made my brother.”

Finally Sif stiffens; Thor lets her go as she backs away, hands moving to rub at where his skin had been against hers but moments ago. “What foolish promise did you make Loki now?”

He does not like the way she speaks with such suspicion, but he cannot resent her for that. “You know that things have…become complex, between us.” Again he struggles to find words for something he does not think even Loki would easily have described. “And such…things…remain between us.”

At first Sif shows no recognition of his meaning. Then, her eyes are blown wide, mouth dropping open. “No.”

“Yes.”

His honesty is worse, it seems; she struggles long before she finally puts his unspoken insinuation into word. “You have lain with Loki?”

“Yes.” The single word brings with it the relief of a secret released, one too long held. Even the shadows and the uncertainty in her eyes cannot hurt as much as this is relief, even as she draws back, away. He lets her have her moment, knowing Sif of all people would never keep her thoughts to herself. She is not Loki, to withdraw and brood and plot upon what he knows. She is Sif, and she fights her battles head on.

When she turns, her braided hair swings like a whip. “The Allfather knows of this?”

“How could he not?” The accusation of both blue eyes and voice troubles him less than it ought, he knows. It is curiosity that drives his question. “Did you choose not to tell him of what you saw?”

Her lips purse, and she looks near-defiant. “I spoke with your mother.”

“What did she say?”

Now her lips turn in a grimace. “That the heart knows what it needs. And that it will take what it wants.”

“I want him.” The simple honesty is as pure as the flesh of Iðunn’s finest harvest of eternity and immortality. He stands, agitated even as he is sure; a moment later, he sits down again upon the furs of his bed. “I _need_ him, Sif.”

Finally she turns her face away, long lines of tension in arm and shoulder and throat. “Thor, he is your _brother_.”

“It is something deeper than even that.”

“It’s that damned spell.” When she whips about again, her hands are in fists and her eyes are as wild as her words. “And this damned _place_. Why did we come here? Why did he even come with us?!”

“This was not his doing.” A coldness washes over him as he speaks – for it brings with it the realisation that perhaps none of this would have happened had Loki not accompanied them upon their ill-fated hunting trip all those days. But then, doing so had not been his notion. He had not even wanted to come, content as always in the libraries with his sorcery and his seeking. Thor’s blood runs cold now as he recalls it. _It will be fun, brother_ , he had said. _How long has it been, since you and I rode out together? Come with us now, and for once take your glory in blood instead of book, in war instead of word!_

 _This is not war. It is only a hunt_. Loki had closed the ancient tome before him with a sigh, though Thor thought to see the gladness behind his eyes. _If you insist, brother, I will come. Norns know I am the one who finds you your greatest trophies, after all._

And never once has Loki spoken of it. Never once had Loki blamed him for any of this.

“Thor, you must end this now,” Sif says, low and urgent, and Thor looks up with despair and destiny coiled tight about his heart.

“If you knew anything of a binding spell, you would have realised this one has been upon us from the very beginning.”

“The beginning?” He does not elaborate, though it seems she does not understand. With a sigh she sits down again at his side. The fight has not gone out of her, but the battlefield has changed as she reaches forward, lays one hand upon his shoulder. “Thor, it cannot end well.”

“It cannot end at all, I think. He is the only one I want.” She winces though she holds his gaze true, and Thor gives a near-helpless shrug. “No-one else would satisfy me.”

“And you wonder why I feel such concern for you,” she mutters, more into despair to herself even as she looks at him alone. “See what such spells can do.”

“It is not a spell!” Lurching upward Thor pulls away from her well-intentioned hand, begins to pace the small span of his tent. “It is more than that! So much more!”

“Of what of the realm? What of your responsibilities?”

“What am I here for now if not the realm and those responsibilities?”

“You are here for him!” Her own shout pulls her to her feet, eyes ablaze with the blue fire so common to the Asgardian berserker. “Always, everything you’ve done, it has been for _him_.”

A thousand years of hurts and hopes blaze now in her eyes. With slim back straight and shoulders strong and back, Sif meets his eyes and speaks with the regal strength of a warrior queen.

“No matter how you might spend your days in our company – in my company…or even the nights…it was always him you thought of first, and last.”

Before her might he is not cowed. Rather, he is shamed. Loosening his own fists, Thor lets his shoulders drop, gives over to apology. “I do not mean to hurt you.” Slowly he moves through the words; though he is not above admitting an error, he has never had the skill or oratory so gifted to mother and brother. “I did not think…they have not spoken of our marriage in perhaps two hundred years, and I did not…” Clumsy now, he cannot even look to her; years it has been, but he can still remember clearly the way she would whisper her name when she found completion in his embrace. “…I did not realise you would feel its loss, so.”

Her own anger has leeched away, and there is heaviness to her motion as she follows him down, takes her place yet again at his side. “Of course I feel that I have lost something. You and I, they spoke of marrying us almost from the cradle. Whatever has passed between us, it is still the loss of something I thought I had known.” And though she has laid one hand upon his in a gesture of comfort it tightens now, short blunt nails digging into flesh. “Do not pity me, Thor.”

He tilts his head up with a half-smile. “I would not dare.”

She smiles back, though again it fades as quickly do the lives of distant mortals. “But I have been jealous of him,” she says, soft. “Always he has been by your side. Always he _will_ be.”

Thor cannot deny such truth. He has never been proficient with lies.

“We would have been ill-matched in marriage, and I’ve known that long before now,” she goes on, each step as decisive as it is careful. “Both of us, we are not suited to remaining in Asgard eternal. Your father’s wandering days are over, but yours stretch long before you. You cannot be as a bird in a gilded cage, no matter if it is a golden throne which binds you. It is no privilege, if what you wish for is the wind and the wilds and all the worlds beyond your great hall.”

“And you are a wanderer too.”

“A warrior born, no matter the body my spirit was gifted to,” she corrects with faint smile. “Do you think it would have suited me any better, the gift of a golden crown to wear while my husband-king rode to war?” She catches Thor’s unease, gentles it away with her strong hand. “Do not think I belittle your mother’s place, for there is no queen like her. She is always and ever true, the constant regent, the constant mother. But I am not she.” An odd kind of longing slips into her voice like long shadows of the past, her eyes distant and near-dreaming. “Sometimes I think, perhaps, that my parents wished for our marriage because they knew it would tie me to the throne, would keep me in place when otherwise I might range far and wide at your side.”

“So you never wished to be my wife?”

“Oh, I wished for it.” Thor’s startled question has brought her back to reality with a jerk, and her smile is wry as she rests one hand upon the sigil of the clasp that holds his robe closed. “But not all wishes are to be granted. Not all wishes are our true heart’s desire.” Settling deeper into her place at his side, her hand now upon the dagger ever at her hip, she smiles to the sky. “In this, being here, I have what I want.”

“On the field today, you were beauty and brilliance. Your staff and sword felled more men than could even a Valkyrie about her vengeance.”

“Careful how you speak, Thor,” she chides with no apparent nod to the compliment, “or a passing Valkyrie might hear, take umbrage, be compelled to spirit me away and teach me true of the ways of her sisterhood.”

“I cannot imagine you any more fierce and proud than you already are.”

She nudges him with one elbow. “You have always lacked imagination.”

There’s an echo of Loki in that, and as if reading his mind her faint smile dims to nothingness, her thoughts too heavy to bear it.

“In a way, it makes a kind of sense – how often did we leave Loki behind?” Perhaps there is guilt there, Thor thinks with sudden wonder while Sif’s thoughts go deeper yet. “With his books and his magics, buried in a tomb of his own making in the palace.”

“You think him more suited to queenship than you?” Raising an eyebrow, he cannot help but say: “Shall I tell him you said so? Because I warn you, I will take to the air with Mjölnir for both a better view and to be clear of the fallout should you allow it.”

The manner in which Sift rolls her eyes is as natural to her as breathing. “I had…hoped, I think. That should we marry, he would be the third. If both king and queen ride out at the head of an army, who better to hold the throne than brother and prince, the great thinker?”

There is a deep sense in that, Thor knows; but it is not truth, and he must speak lightly when he says: “Careful, Sif, it almost sounds as if you compliment him.”

“But then…Thor.” Her tongue flicks out over her tongue, a gesture of nervousness he remembers from their long ago childhoods. “He is no more able to be held down, held back, than you or me.”

The cold truth of her words, mirrored in her eyes, is like ice driven beneath his skin by the frost giants who had birthed Loki and never known him again. Sif goes on, relentless now as she is in roused battle.

“You are a wanderer and a warrior – but they are tied together. You go looking for your fights.” Passing a hand over her forehead, she presses her lips together, one hand shaking as if seeking to call a weapon to hand. “Loki, he does not go looking for anything. He seeks only what he finds. And then he seeks again.”

“What are you saying?”

From the tilt of her head, she might almost pity him his unwillingness to see. “One day, you will be as your father – as will I, should we not fall in noble battle. One day, we will wish not to fight on these front lines, but to remain behind where we can guide and train and grant whatever we call wisdom to those who follow us.” Both hands rise and fall in sudden despair. “Loki will never know that peace. He is restless. He’ll never find what he seeks, because what he seeks is forever unknown.”

“Sif—”

When she speaks, it is fierce and true. “It is not jealousy, Thor. It is concern.” Coming close, taking place again at his side, she places one hand upon the curved planes of his face and shakes her head. “I fear you truly do not know what it is, that you have done.”

“ _Sif_.”

Her hand is cool, skin rasping against his beard. “There is no-one else in all the realms who holds more power over you than Loki,” she whispers, and his heart stutters even as old ugly frustration rises.

“And you do not trust the second prince of all Asgard with such power?”

Even in the face of such emotion Sif is strong. “He does not trust _himself_ with it. That is why I fear for you.” She pauses, and now looks away. “For you both.”

Though he wishes it could be otherwise, Thor does not know how to explain. But for Loki, he thinks he must try. He knows he will try.

“I feel as though we are two halves,” he begins, halting and uncertain. “Only by being together are we what we should be.” Sif’s eyes upon him remained almost pitying, and he curves his lips around his frustration. “Do not misunderstand, I know all too well why both princes could not go to the same front, but—”

“While I can understand how you feel, do you not think that perhaps some things are split asunder for a reason?”

The interruption, sharp as her blades, brings with it the sudden thought of the child. In that the blades goes in far deeper than she had even intended. She seems to realise it, rising to her feet and stepping back. Only then does Thor realise he had been staring at her, fists clenched and jaw aching.

And upon her pedestal Mjölnir trembles, the storm twisted about her star-death head.

“I am sorry to have disturbed you.” Her head bows low, trembling fist held over her heart. “I will take my leave now, my king. You need your rest.”

With a sigh Thor lets go his anger. None of this is Sif’s fault, Sif’s burden. “I need your truth,” he says, and Mjölnir falls silent. “Thank you, Sif.”

“I love you.” Her eyes widen, as is she has surprised herself by saying the words aloud. Then her chin tilts upward and her lips tighten and in that moment of utter defiance of fate and propriety Thor has never loved her more. “You are my king, but before that, you are my friend.”

“As I love you.” A loose smile curves of one corner of his lips. “I would name you the fairest warrior in all the realms, but I fear you would take that warrior of your blood and beat my own beauty clean out of me should I even dare.”

Her eyes roll skyward in return. “Careful. You sound almost like Loki, with that silvered tongue.” But indignant amusement dies a scarce moment later when she says in low seriousness: “Thor, truly you must be careful.”

Seated upon the edge of his bed, he only shrugs. “I have no plans to die – today, tomorrow, indeed any time at all.”

“The Norns make such plans for us, Thor.” With quick step she comes before him, and before he can think to react places a light kiss upon his lips. She lingers just a moment, something near-sisterly in her tender concern when she murmurs: “Sleep, now.”

Thor does not think he will. Yet when she is gone and he closes his eyes, Thor is lost.

Until someone else entirely comes to find him.

 

*****

 

This is Vanaheimr. But even with that knowledge Thor knows it is something different. Something stranger. Tall candles makes a great circle about the room, wrought of ice – and yet somehow they burn. It should be impossible, but how they do _burn_. The flare of it is unnatural, green-tipped with deep blue at its blazing heart. Standing before one now Thor does not even know if it would be heat he would feel should he press his fingers inside. Or perhaps all that lurks within the blue is frozen death wrought from fire and from flame.

“I am here.”

Thor swings about – and gives himself over to swift intaken breath. This is a dream, then: for there is his brother, but it is not Loki as he had left him in Asgard. Swollen greatly with child, his once soft skin pulls taut over his belly. For all his mother’s knowledge Thor is not familiar with such matters, but everything about this tells him Loki is near his time. At that size, he could surely be nothing but.

Yet as he knows he should be glad for such vision of his brother, given how long they have been apart, when Thor goes to him he finds no true joy in it. This is the chamber where Loki had been taken first, and even now he lies naked upon the altar while the floors are awash again with blood that comes from nowhere Thor can name.

Loki lies on his back despite the great weight of the belly on his vulnerable spine, its curve arching up from the cold stone. Unclothed, he should be the pale-skinned Aesir Thor has known his whole life. But it is not the truth; there is now a touch of the Jötunn to him. The red sheen of the sclera of his eyes is brightening by the moment, though the green holds true about its darkest centre. The lines of his Jötunn heritage are upon his skin once more, too; they are not the raised keloid tissue of the true form, but rather like a delicate tracery of blue beneath ivory, fresh set of veins.

Yet for all the coiled malice of memory in this place, for all the oddity of his position, Loki does not seem in pain. Thor is cautious still as he approaches, watchful and wary of something that does not quite feel a dream. His every instinct whispers that something is wrong, something is not right – or at the least, something is different. Then he looks upon his brother’s body, and with a gasp he _knows_.

There has been a shift in his belly, one Jötunn-patterned hand moving to rest near his groin. Following its passage, Thor has now seen that though his manhood remains something has changed about Loki.

“Surely you realised the child had to be born in some shape or fashion,” he says, wry, and Thor swallows hard, wants to look away even as he knows he cannot.

“I…” Shaking his head, he presses thick fingers to his temple. “…I did not think.”

“How peculiar, for you who thinks so often and so well!”

Ignoring Loki’s scorn – it is easy, for one who has born it since youth – Thor squints, almost squirms. “But…you are no woman.” His skin feels hot, uncomfortable, one size too small. “In all else…”

“It is but a means to an end. The child will be, _must_ be born.”

“Here?” Then he denies it, with frown and word. “No. I dreamed…the child is to be born in Asgard, whether Mother and Eir will attend his birth, where Fulla might be his wet-nurse.”

Loki’s whole body moves with easy laughter, though he seems slave to the great weight that bears him down against blooded cursed marble. “And thus the Mighty Thor takes on the power of prophecy?”

“Why should it be born in this place?”

The bare shoulders move with nonchalance. “He was conceived here.”

“That does not mean we cannot choose to birth him in a manner and a setting more fitting to his place, and his parentage.”

“Will that really alter the inevitable, do you think?”

“Do you believe I cannot change fate to suit my will?”

The complex emotions that move across Loki’s face seem like the clouds woven upon their mother’s loom, dense with thread and the wisdom worked in each. When he speaks again Loki’s eyes have moved onwards, his voice low as a storm already blown out.

“This is not a dream. Not like the other.”

Thor presses him still, pulls him back. “And what is a dream, truly?”

“Why, whatever we make of it.”

Despite the bitterness of those words Thor now lays his hands upon the great swell of his brother’s belly. It invokes a lazy turn of the child within. Such sensation shivers through him, this given knowledge; this is blood of his blood, bone of his bone, a prophecy made flesh.

“Does it hurt?” he asks, hollow and hoarse, and Loki rolls his eyes.

“No. It does not hurt.”

His eyes move down again, and he swallows hard. “It wasn’t there…before.”

“Of course it wasn’t. It didn’t need to be.”

It doesn’t really answer his question, but then Thor has not the strength to voice it. He supposes in that he deserves no answer. “You will be delivered of the child soon?”

“Here, perhaps.” Loki’s eyes slip closed, as if drawn down by sudden exhaustion. “But only in dreams.”

“Is this a dream?”

The look this earns him is exasperated. “What do you believe it is, then?”

“I don’t know what to believe!” His hands slap down upon the marble of the altar, and suddenly his wishes for Mjölnir, to tear about this damned place that changed everything and goes on to haunt them still. “I don’t know _anything_!”

“Why are you so distressed? It can’t be a new sensation, surely.”

On his knees now, Thor lowers his face to his palms. “Loki, don’t tease me.”

“And I _know_ that is no new sensation, to you.”

“I miss you.” He looks up, eyes wide, burning with saltwater. “I want you. I _need_ you.”

Loki’s surprise and scorn are like oil and water upon the surface of his soul. “You really do love me, then?”

“I have always loved you.” His disbelief yanks him upward, and he closes his hands about his brother’s. “I’ve never known a day when I didn’t.” Then he pauses; he’s never been able to lie worth a damn. “….well, there have been days when you’d annoyed me, but I still loved you. Even if I wanted to drag you to the myrtle fountain and hold your head in the deep end.”

“Which you have been known to do.”

He winces. “I’m sorry.”

“You weren’t at the time.”

Again, Thor is at the mercy of his honest heart. “Indeed I was not.” But he sees no dishonour in changing the subject, in saying: “Perhaps I ought to doubt _your_ devotion. Why do you not write me? Have you forgotten me so easily?”

The scowl he wears matches the hands that go about his belly. “How could I?”

“So you carry only my child in your belly and not my love in your heart?”

Thor’s roughness leaves Loki thoughtful, though only for the barest instant. Then he sighs. “Do you not wonder why I come to you in this form?” he asks, with a care that cannot help but put Thor to mind of a hawk circling its prey from on high. “It is wrought by your mind more than mine.”

“I told you, I dreamed of you. Of the birth and of the child.”

“So that is how you see me when I come to you in this manner.” Loki casts his half-caste eyes about the room, snorts. “Although I chose this place.”

“Why would you think to birth a child in this place, even if this is just you walking in my dreams?” This is a dangerous path to choose to walk, but still he blunders down it anyway. “Loki, I spoke to you of what I saw in this chamber, when I returned to Vanaheimr in your guise.”

“Indeed you did.” And there had been no sense in any of it; Loki had given no answers, had asked no questions of his own. All there had been was a single statement: _“It is a place of wild magic; it was such long before they sought to tame it.”_

But Loki does not dwell upon that. Instead he fixes eyes upon him, almost scornful. “And so you dreamed of the birth, and never knew how it happened?”

“How could I?” Rubbing a hand back through his hair, Thor flushes almost with shame, though such arts are not for men to know. “The only child I ever saw you with was Sleipnir. And then, you were a mare. As for the others…you did not bear those.” Then he flushes deeper, knowing again how very little he knows of his brother and his deep magics. “…did you?”

“I did.” He has gone very distant, and Thor knows not how to pull him back. He reaches out with word all the same.

“You were their mother?” Thor is not made for such confusion. “Then who was the father?”

“I was.” Already he laughs, waving away questions unformed with one easy sweep of a hand. “Do not go there, Thor. It was not like that.”

The memory of Loki’s sorcerous doubles about their work, however, lingers in his mind no matter how he tries to push them aside. “Then how?”

“There is life in everything.” Again his hands rise, his shoulders following. “I just wanted to see if I could shape it myself.”

“There are…simpler ways, to have children.”

But Loki shakes his head; he almost seems disappointed, though Thor cannot remember a day when Loki had ever believed his brother capable of following his complex trains of thought. “I felt as if I was missing something. Some vital part of myself.” The shake of his head then is near violent. “ _No_ …no, that I needed to _connect_ to something. The realm, perhaps. As if to find my place within it.” Something between pride and melancholy wears his face as a mask now. “Snake, wolf, a girl between two worlds. No wonder Father took them from me. I was seeking outside to make myself whole. I loved them. I love them still. But they weren’t what I was looking for.”

“Is that why you _let_ Father take them?”

“I did not let him do anything.” Sharpness gives way to sorrow, and Loki’s gaze drops to his hands. “He gave me no choice. Though in the end…he was right. There was nothing I could do for them.”

“Our child will be with us.”

“Of course he will be,” Loki says, almost seeming to scorn Thor’s confidence. “He was what I was seeking. He will be that which makes us whole.” Then he looks up, and he is laughing even as he looks to be on the verge of screaming. “Although I must be a monster to do so. I must fall before I can rise.”

Before Thor can ask what he means there is a great shimmer of blue; then, Loki lies before him wrapped in the trueness of his Jötunn form. Thor takes a startled breath, a half-step back. Loki’s laughter echoes over the cursed walls of even this dreamspace, slow cry of a calving glacier.

And the red eyes are upon him again: rich and crimson, warm as blood, as much filled with life as the swollen belly beneath.

“You loved me in this form, once,” he says, soft and accusing, “or was that just play? Curiosity? The mighty Thor as explorer of the obscene, the monstrous, always wanting to conquer all with either his hammer or his cock?”

“Loki.” He chokes on the word, on the fact that it cannot say all that he needs him to know. “Do not speak this way.”

The crimson eyes rise to the vaulted distant ceiling. There had been a hole there, in the real place. To let in the storm, when they had made their escape. Here now is only darkness, and Thor has no sense at all of where Mjölnir might now rest.

“You dreamed of the babe. Of his birth, to Asgard.” Loki speaks like a sleepwalker, thoughtful and strange. “You have always been ever the dreamer, brother mine.”

“This is a dream too, is it not?”

“One more lucid than most.” Turning his head again, he waves a hand, winces as the babe turns again in his swollen abdomen. “Dreams make sense of what we gather from the worlds about us. Most do it by thought or action, and what is reaped from those fields is only what grows beneath the surface, what is already set in place, whether by seed or shoot or spreading branch.”

“Loki,” and suddenly Thor is very afraid, “Loki, what have you been doing in Asgard?”

“You will return home soon.” His smile is almost pitying, but the warmth of it is true. “There is little more to be done in this sector when the lines are secure, as they so very nearly are. You will return to Asgard, and then you will come to me.”

“I will always come to you.”

“Then _look_ at me.” He tries to sit up, fails; still his eyes are strong and true, his voice sharp demand. “Look upon my body, and tell me that you are not sickened by what I am, by what has become of the brother you once knew.”

“You are Loki.”

It seems as though he wants to laugh, though he only grits his teeth. “Then touch me.”

“I…will it not hurt?”

The exasperation is sharp, sudden. “Would I ask this if it did?”

“Would you?”

The question gives Loki pause. Then, it gives him low laughter. “Sometimes I forget you are more clever than I give you credit for.” But he reaches for his hand, draws him close, places it low. “It won’t hurt me. Quite the opposite, really.”

Beneath his fingers Thor feels now strange sensation. Loki’s touch presses him to place warm and soft; the hair is as dark as what is upon his head, and more coarse. Thor does not know if all Jötunn are like this always, or if it is merely a function of birth, but the hardening flesh above reminds him that this is very different from any other way they have been together. One finger moves, slips between the damp folds, and Loki gives a long tremulous breath.

“Just fuck me already,” he breathes. “If you loved me, you would _fuck_ me.”

But Thor’s hands are still gentle over this unfamiliar body, even with the memory of the last time he had done just that when Loki had worn his Jötunn skin. “I am not certain that is true.”

Loki’s body rocks with laughter, his words echoing aftershock. “Don’t they say we always hurt the ones we love the most?”

“I have no desire to hurt you.”

“Liar.” But Thor can tender to protest because Loki arches up, hands pressed to his face as he draws him down to swallow word and breath both. The kiss deepens as moments pass, and in the fierceness of it Thor can taste salt and knows not if it is born of blood or tears. Even when Loki releases him he cannot see; he has rolled to his side, curled about his belly with spine in knobbled curve. One arm moves back, gestures forward.

“Lie against me, brother,” he says, upon this bloodied altar. “Be with me this way.”

Something impatient, something hungry works through Loki’s mouth in the way of his words, a creature clawing up from some dark and low place. Thor understands none of this, wants to draw back – but Loki catches his wrist, fingers like manacles.

“It is more comfortable for me,” he says, and the nails are deep enough to draw blood. “Thor. Do this for me now.”

“I…Loki, I can’t.”

There is a pause. When Loki speaks, it is the low danger of an avalanche about to fall. “What?”

It is not in his nature to deny Loki what he wants, not when so much changes and has changed between them. But as he lies behind his brother upon the altar with the unnatural blue-green light of the ice candles sending up mocking shadow, Thor cannot believe that this is a good idea. “It…reminds me of how it was. For you. With them.”

“You have no idea how it was for me in their hands.”

The vicious sound is that of a viper about to lunge with fans primed and ready. Thor does not move out of its striking distance. “But I do know how they would have had me mount you. Like a bitch in heat.”

“And now I am a bitch in pup,” he snaps back, and his grip burns. “What does it matter? Do this for me now.”

“You are always my brother, and my beloved,” he says, dogged, and Loki goes very still.

“It is different, Thor.” Now he sounds different. Young, almost. And so very, very tired. “Because I trust you to do this for me.”

“But I love you,” he says, helpless, and Loki draws a low long breath.

“So you have said.” When he releases it, his hand falls from his wrist and the final plea is a scarce whisper. “ _Please_.”

That, in the end, is what draws him in, draws him deep. Thor enters his brother with a low thrust. After a moment he begins the rhythm of in and out; one hand is steady upon Loki’s trembling back, though the other moves forward. It only finds rest upon the great straining belly, the faint movement of their child within.

“Do you trust me, Thor?” Loki says with the whispering voice of a distant star, and Thor tastes salt at the back of his throat.

“Always.”

But he does wonder even when he shivers with his climax, a low and strange thing. Loki clenches upon his member, draws him dry as if he seeks another seed to take hold in his womb, though another has long since blossomed there. Then he lies still, though he makes no motion to pull free. Thor reaches forward with clumsy hand, cock still within his borrowed cunt, and lay a hand upon a cool cheek. The trail of tears there is both fresh and so very, very old.

“You fool,” Loki whispers, and then darkness steals over them both.

 

*****

 

It nears the twice-turn of the moon when they return. While Thor did not doubt the dream had been a summons of a sort, Loki had spoken of a task to be completed. Therefore, only when the garrisons are in place and the great swathe of the north-east province is secure under Aesir command and control, does Thor call forth the Bifröst and return home to Asgard to stage war council and have tell of the campaign thus far.

Without second thought he leaves his companions at the observatory to raise Mjölnir to the star-wrought sky of his kingdom; like a storm upon the air Thor moves towards the golden place, amongst spire and song. Pause comes only when he looks upon the great stage at its heart, the belly where her people stand, the great open windows that gaze out upon Asgard while cradling close the place of her strength:

The throne.

Even at the distance of the entire throne hall he sees her there upon Hliðskjálf: Frigga, queen to the Allfather. Dressed in ivory and gold, her long curls in a coronet wound with gold thread and silver leaves, she holds Gungnir in one white hand as she stands to welcome her king home.

Thor’s heart stumbles, wordless stutter of impotent thunder – but his step is true, eyes unblinking. With the sure step of a warrior born and blooded and brilliant Thor keeps walking though every footfall screams for the hollowness of such homecoming. There is no sign of Loki: not by the throne, not in the gathered multitude. And Thor knows it. He’d known it as soon as he had stepped foot upon the runed floors of the palace.

Loki is not here.

With Mjölnir upon his belt Thor removes his feathered helm, goes to one knee at the foot of the throne. “Allmother,” he speaks, low and clear with his eyes upon the marbled floor, “we thank you for holding the throne of Asgard in our absence.”

The whisper of her gown is familiarity itself as she descends to him; her touch is light longing as she presses two fingers beneath his chin and raises it up to meet her soft smile.

“It was my duty and my responsibility,” she says with sweet strength. “You need not bow to me, my king. Now that you are within her golden halls again, Asgard is yours.”

He rises again, and she bows low as Gungnir is returned to his hand. The low thrum of power shivers through him like unfamiliar warmth as it touches the ground. It is his connection to the land, and to the sky which cradles it. With it comes the urge to turn, to throw himself in Hliðskjálf and search only for his brother while caring not for the realm or the people spread before him. Because even as he tells himself Loki cannot be far he fears otherwise.

“Your brother regrets he is not able to attend upon your grace.” Frigga speaks soft, and perhaps even the flanking Einherjar cannot quite hear her. “He will return as soon as he is able.”

There is something far deeper there, even as Thor recalls with a stab of despair Loki’s promise as given in only dream. “I am glad to know of his devotion to king and realm,” he says, stiff and formal as ceremonial armour, and then turns to his people. When Frigga withdraws it leaves the space at his side, where his shadow would always be, truly empty. The yearning of it feels like the space about a spinning singularity. He’d felt himself falling the first time he’d stood here declared heir; the second time, named king. But he’d had Loki both times. And then, he’d _had_ Loki, on that samesuch throne.

_Where are you now?_

Upon both lips and tongue he senses the bitter taste of the dream, rotten apples turning to rancid ash in his mouth. Everything he gives of himself now to his people is a mask worn over his tumultuous interior, a façade glittering and golden. _How like Loki I am now_ , he thinks even as he smiles, gives a roar of victory answered in turn by thousands of grateful voices. With hands raised, Gungnir in one and Mjölnir upon his belt, he begins to speak in words that say nothing of his own aching doubts.

_How am I to save you, when all I can think of is him?_

“My people, my friends,” he shouts, voice reverberating from column and marble and the great throne itself, “I return to speak to you of how progresses the war!”

As he does give tell of how the armies have moved across from the borders to the alleged centre of the war-queen’s power. In this Thor feels a mummer, a bard, a skald telling tales simply because it is his duty. He also supposes he should feel shame. He is a warrior; since childhood this has been his dream, to wield a weapon of legend in one hand and hold Gungnir in the other, a golden king leading his devoted people to victory and glory.

But here he is a man without a shadow. No man should be without his shadow.

When it is done he wishes to leave by the great doors behind the throne. Instead he knows his duty and takes it even to his troubled heart. Descending from the throne Thor walks through the gauntlet of nobles and warriors and the citizens of Asgard, listening to cheers and well-wishes, grasping back at the hands that reach for him. There come a thousand touches, and more – and yet he feels not a one save for the upraised hand of his mother, held between them as they walk amongst their people, and to the place where the true king lies dreaming.

The chamber is as he always remembers: the mirrored floors with arching runes of power and protection, white light spilling through the ceiling like the face of a moon turned only upon its beloved world. Odin still slumbers beneath the gold-wrought doubles of his ever-watchful ravens, each with a single wing raised in salute. The longship in which Odin sleeps is afire with light, but golden and healing instead of crimson and consuming, and it does not yet set sail to his final rest.

Frigga takes her accustomed place by his left hand. Troubled and lovely amongst the furs of great bears slain by her husband’s now stilled hands, she holds still a tranquillity Thor has known of her since birth. He has no doubt that Asgard has been safe in her cradling hands; any goddess who could raise two sons such as hers could have been nothing but strong and sure and true.

“His sleep is untroubled,” she murmurs, one hand reaching forward to rest upon his. “But it is long.”

“We have no idea of when he might awaken?”

“When it is needful.” Frigga has many smiles, and this one Thor cannot quite name when she looks up and gifts its small secret curve to him. “A once and future king.”

It prickles across his skin as he takes his own seat at his father’s side – for he is not ready to take the throne. Yet he holds Gungnir in his hand, the throne is his, and he will not even stay to sit upon it. Not when the realm’s trouble stretch so much further than these golden halls.

“Mother, where is Loki?”

“His research drew him away.” She displays no disquiet in anticipation of Thor’s reaction, every word as mild and rich as mother’s milk. “You mustn’t be angry with him.”

“Who said I was angry?”

This smile was soft, but only in the sense of folded sharpened steel in a fine-worked sheath. “He has spent his days searching for that which might aid us.”

“Sorcery and seiðr?”

“Yes.” One hand rises, as if to reach across to lay its warmth upon his brow and the troubled thoughts beneath. “The weapons vault is a repository of dangerous hope.”

But the distance between them is great. “He wishes to make use of what is there?”

“Of what was,” she corrects, both hands now light upon her husband’s. “Your father took one of the greatest of its secrets to another realm many a year ago, in the hopes of keeping it hidden from those who might abuse its power.”

“And Loki…”

“Wishes to fetch it back.” Her voice strengthens, as if she speaks before the gathered multitudes of all of Asgard. “In the name of his king, and for the good of our realm.”

“Why did he not ask me?”

“You named him regent. I expect he did not believe he needed the king’s permission.”

The truth of it coils in his gut. It is not just that Loki had such influence, and knew it. Instead, something deeper stirs, memory and truth alike.

_(“He is no more able to be held down, held **back** , than you or me.”)_

He’d known even then the truth of Sif’s words. Still he rails against them. “He was to stay here!”

“He asked me to hold the throne in his place.” One fine eyebrow raised, and the coronet of spun gold wrought in patterns of flower and bloom and silver leaf amongst her hair glint in the Allfather’s healing light. “Was he wrong to do so?”

“No, I just…” Frustrated, Thor lays Gungnir down, golden line between his sleeping father and his own restless soul. “How could he _do_ such a thing in his state?”

“Because he is in that state.”

Thor’s head jerks up, glaring at his mother; she, of all people, ought to know better. “But the child…!”

And the wry wisdom in those blue eyes speaks deeper of her knowledge than even her clever words. “Did I never tell you, how I went to war with you in my belly?”

“I…” Struck dumb, Thor must search hard for what few words he manages to give at all. “…you did?”

“Only in the earliest days, of course. When heavy with child, one is unavoidably slowed.” Even as her eyes soften with memory, her voice hardens with the drive of a warrior born. “But early or late, I would do anything to protect the child of my blood and bone that I held within my body.”

Thor’s hand clench into fists upon his thighs, and he cannot look away from the roused glory of his mother’s need to protect.

“And I would have done the same for Loki himself.” Now she leans forward, over the Allfather’s body, and whispers with the intensity of the divine mother’s glory: “I would have fought with Loki in my arm, behind my shield, had I needed to defend my right to raise my child.”

Something stirs low beneath his heart, as much fear as awe. “You were afraid they would take him from you?”

She laughs without sound, leaning back, the wakened mother bear slipping back behind the façade of the Asgardian wife and queen. “Better to be afraid for those that would dare try, even now,” she says, soft, eyes flicking to her nails. And Thor frowns.

“So you are telling me that Loki has gone to _fight_ for this artefact?”

“No.” Unmoved by his disgust, Frigga wears her regal nature as easily as she does her moon-white skin. “At least, not in the manner you might think. It is not a simple task, nor a short one – but do not doubt him simply because he carries a child.” The rich red of her lips shimmers like blood the moment she smiles, though it is more secret than amused. “Believe it from the heart of one who knows such truths, Thor: it makes him less reckless, not more.”

“But I need him here.”

“And thus he will return.”

“I must speak with him now.” Again his fists clench in impotent frustration. “Mother, where is he?”

“You must think of the kingdom. As does he.”

Feeling the storm seep through his veins to pool in his heart while seated before his mother is a rare sensation, and deeply uncomfortable. She is the calm; she is not the instigator. And he raises his fists, coaxes until they are but open palms spread before him, and grimaces. “It is like a disease,” he says finally, eyes upon where his nails have dug deep grooves into the lines of hand and life. “All the time I was away, he was like a shadow I could not see, chased away by my eyes every time I chanced to look his way. And as I rode home, knowing he would be here…” His eyes close, and in his mouth he tastes bitter snow. “…I must see him.”

“Thor, your people need you.”

“And I need him!”

To that she had no answer save the gentle pity of the eyes she had gifted him with her blood and her bone. _But we see the world so differently_ , he thinks, in sudden despair. _Even before things became so very strange, she was always the heart while I was the blood that rushed about every strong limb, indulging in motion and action before returning to be blessed again with that which gives me life._

“Do you know what this is, Mother?” he murmurs, half in defeat, half in wonder. “This… _need_. I cannot help but think of him. Is it seiðr? Is it a curse? I do not know. All I understand is that I must…” Realisation comes to him then, creeping over the horizon like a storm never once predicted. “…he said I should come to him. On Vanaheimr. He said we would secure our place and I would return to Asgard, and then I would come to him.” One shaking hand moves back through the mess of his hair, hope and dread warring low in his belly. “He never said he was in Asgard himself.”

Frigga’s watchful gaze holds both pride and pity. When Thor speaks again, his voice roughens with a god-king’s command.

“Mother, where is Loki now?”

For the faintest of moments it seems she will give him no answer. Then she turns her face to her husband, long fingers weaving unseen pattern over the motionless hand beneath her own. “Your brother has gone to Midgard.”

“ _Midgard_?”

“He seeks the tesseract.”

The word means only little to him; Thor has scant recollection of many of the objects of the weapons vault. But it does not matter. Loki knows such things. And Loki would not have chosen to leave Asgard for nothing less than its salvation.

“Thor!”

Only at the door to the Allfather’s bedchamber does he turn. Gungnir lies upon the furs, glinting golden light not far from his father’s hand. “Hold the kingdom for me,” Thor says, already turning fierce gaze back to the path he will take now. “I will not be gone long.”


	8. Looking Into the Heart of Light, the Silence.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Midgard proves to be of far more interest than Thor might once had credited it. Then again, Loki started this. He is at the start of everything, perhaps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I have to say a huge and massive _thank you_ to everyone who is still reading along despite my continued shitstorm meltdowns over this fic and my writing in general; honestly, I have no idea what is wrong with my brain sometimes. And even though the simple answer to all this angst would be TO STOP WRITING, I...don't think it would help. All the words would still be there, just...dammed up and hurting. So, here they are, spilled across the page instead. Er.
> 
> And thank you, especially, to everyone who left feedback -- the generosity and insight you've given me has helped me more than I can ever hope to say. I just...yes. Thank you. I've cried more than once, but always in the best of ways. <3
> 
> So, here we are. I'm so sorry for the delay; again, I just didn't know what to do wit myself. And then at the end of a weekend of travelling this just _poured_ out of me, so here we are. Late, but here we are. I am also slightly mystified because I had been of the impression that Midgard was going to be a single-chapter interlude, but then Thor and Loki went overboard and well...smut smothers plot. I guess we'll get the rest of that next time...? At least it's a nice long chapter to make up for my absense. I think. I could just be rabbiting on about nothing, again...I'm so self-indulgent. [headdesk]
> 
> Thank you so much for sticking with me this far. <3 In return, all I can do is promise I'll ride this shooting star right to the very end.

“You will not go alone.”

It is not in his mind to deny her, though the only accompaniment he will then permit is Sif herself. The only consideration he allows the matter is brief; he is king, after all, and it is Midgard. They have not seen him in all his great glory, and it would be perhaps unfitting for him to walk amongst them with nothing to reflect his greatness.

“But you do not go to seek glory,” Sif points out when he muses about the lack of an entourage he had not truly wanted. “You want only _him_ ,” she adds with wry truth, and he gives a sudden snort.

“Yes, and he’d probably laugh at the goats.”

“Loki has done worse things with goats and you know it.”

Serious as the matter is, Thor cannot help the great guffaw that escapes him. “Not Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr,” he says, when he catches breath enough to speak; Sif’s own words are spoken around a wide smirk.

“That you know of.”

There’s an argument to be had, in that. He smiles instead, and leaves it to lie undisturbed. Loki’s honour is no cheap thing, and he will not allow it to be tarnished – but this is Sif, and she only ever gives as good as she gets. Therefore he can think of only one other companion he might have wanted more as they move together; his shining armour sparks gold where Mjölnir is uru-silver song as they stride down the rainbow bridge to open the Bifröst and travel in Loki’s footsteps.

Still, disquiet moves through his heart at the answer his first question receives. “He did not come this way,” Thor repeats, and his eyes drop to the kaleidoscopic river of light beneath his feet. Heimdall does not know exactly where Loki had gone, for Loki had not left Asgard by this route.

A moment later he looks up, nods briefly. It had never been Heimdall’s task to stop Loki from leaving, gatekeeper or no. Certainly it is well within Thor’s power to forbid it now, and the words linger upon the tip of his tongue when he says instead: “But he will return this way.”

“All do,” Heimdall says, voice a low and sonorous bass that reverberates across time and space. “Or so go the old ways.”

It can be hard to tell what Heimdall means at the best of times. Before Thor can even consider demanding clarification that is likely beyond his understanding, the gatekeeper presses the sword into the central dais and the gateway irises to life. Then, they are flying. It’s a different sensation to that of flight under the guidance of Mjölnir. With her, he rides the storm as its focus, the hub around which rain and cloud and lightning spiral and sing. This is different: this is feeling the world remade around him when he is not at its centre, but instead one part of many. Shining and brilliant though he will always remain, for endless changing moment he is but one glass shard in the twisting kaleidoscope of ages past, present, and future alike.

In that, Thor always feels very small. It is easier to focus on where he goes than to linger upon the preternatural journey they make.

Desert blooms to life before them in the brief second before the Bifröst releases them from its divine guidance. He lands easily, the ground in full tremor beneath his feet. Sif is tall and slender at his side, shield upon her back while cloak and hood swathe her in crimson-tinted shadow. Then again, all seems shadow when Thor passes his eyes over their surrounds in quick martial assessment. Night cradles this aspect of Midgard, and the sky is filled with the shifting patterns of unfamiliar stars revealed as the sparking clouds funnel away. Within moments nothing remains of the Bifröst, save for the rune-pattern beneath their feet. With another glance upward, a brief half-circle made with Mjölnir in hand, Thor marks their position and then nods.

“Do you even know when he is?” Sif says, turning; her face is pure chiaroscuro, though her eyes are blue and watchful. “It is no small realm.”

And it has been many years since they have come to this place. But this is the anchor site nearest to Loki’s position as Heimdall had been permitted to know it. It does not help matters that Loki often slips his sight, and Heimdall had been able to offer little as to his activities. Yet this brings only faint concern. Thor trusts Loki’s judgement. And Loki has called him here now.

“I can feel him.”

Though the desert air is cool, the shiver that moves though Sif’s body seems more in response to the rumbling brontide of Thor’s words. “ _Feel_ him?”

“To the west.” When he raises Mjölnir, she too begins to sing; Sif cannot hear such, he knows, but something low in his abdomen stirs. In this he cannot be wrong. “I believe I can find him.”

He takes one step, then two; upon the verge of the third she speaks again, unmoved from where she had once stood at his side. “Thor.”

The sand whispers beneath boot as he swings about, brow creased in a frown. “Yes?”

“That is…not usual.”

“Nothing about us is usual.” For the first time he feels the slightest hint of doubt; she is Sif, and she had never turned from a battle. He wonders, now, what causes her to stay her hand in even this brief fashion. His own he extends to her, the other still tight about Mjölnir’s cured leather. “Will you come with me all the same?”

“I came this far, didn’t I?”

Without hesitation she steps forward and he cannot help his wide smile. The warmth of her burns familiar against his side as he pulls Sif close and raises Mjölnir. And she can sense Loki too, he knows; his brother is lodestone for heart and for hammer alike. But then Thor had felt from the first moment he had seen her that Mjölnir was some missing part of his spirit; she’d completed him in a such a way he does not know how he’d never missed her, before he’d first taken her haft in hand.

Thor does not remember the first time he’d seen Loki. In that way he had therefore always been part of his soul, whether they’d consciously recognised it or not.

As they cross the unfamiliar sky like a pair of shooting stars, Thor knows they have not far to go. Loki is calling to him, he thinks. Not with words: it is pure thought, shot through with true emotion. He does not question how Loki knows he is here, any more than he might ever question how he himself knows where to find Loki. The Norns weave a complex tapestry, but Loki has always been contrary enough to construct loom enough of his own.

A building emerges from the desert below them, sprawled like a web; mechanical contraptions and mortals alike moving like ants over its haphazard surface. They appear to be giving their approach no attention. Still he feels Sif’s hands tighten their grip; it is welcome reminder of her presence always worthy at his side. She always had known how to match herself to him.

Their entrance is a great crash through the roof. As it splinters around them in dust and debris, a blaring sound rises to herald their arrival. It comes both from human throat and from that of their favoured inanimate thralls. For all the cacophony of it, this is of no concern to him; nothing can compete with the call of Loki in his mind.

_You are here. I know it._

But they have earned themselves a welcoming party. As Thor turns towards the shimmering secret curve of reality that whispers _Loki_ , a figure who is most definitely not his brother careens into view in the largest of the three remaining doorways. When it comes to a halt, its feet resume the floor though its upheld hands glow a white-edged blue to match the narrow slits of its eyes. “…right. We got Fabio here – must be the one.” The head tilts, its voice moving from business to cynical curiosity. “…though he never mentioned Xena.”

It is a mortal in full armour, Thor realises; red and gold, with preternatural glow at chest to match that of its gauntlets. It’s not sorcery – something about it instead whispers to Thor of some connection to the spirit within. It reminds him in a peculiar way of his own affinity for Mjölnir. But then, while the hammer is as much a sorcerous weapon at her heart as Loki’s own seiðr, Thor’s own intuition of magic has never been as strong as this.

_But then, that is how you found Loki. You looked at the weave, caught the tail of the thread his very presence wove into the fabric of this realm, and followed it to the source._

Yet he has not yet found said source, for all Loki’s presence burns like phoenix flame along every nerve ending. “Stand aside, mortal,” Thor intones, Mjölnir raised, Sif strong silent shadow at his side. “I have business here that is none of yours.”

“Geez, real humble lot, aren’t you?” Though the mortal gives no quarter, the exasperation in his voice speaks more of a strategist than the warrior Thor might have expected given the garb he has chosen. “Suppose that’s what you get, for living way up in the sky like gods. …so go on, tell me then: what’s your name, O Mighty One?”

An amused voice breaks through the tension, easy as cracking ice. “Do try not to be too much of a fool, Stark – you _know_ his name.”

 _As I know yours_ , Thor’s mind whispers, his body already twisted in a half-turn. A moment later and there he is, sauntering into the room amongst a collection of mortal soldiers. Drawing to a halt, undisturbed by the scattered rubble beneath his bare feet, Loki raises and waves a nonchalant hand to the darkly clad and masked mortals fanned about him like a personal guard.

“You may stand down, gentlemen,” he says, and for the first time Thor realises the cool metal in their hands are as weapons, even as Loki’s eyes fall upon his and nothing else matters. “He is exactly as I named him,” he murmurs, and the voice that answers is as incredulous as it is curious.

“This really _is_ the God of Thunder?”

“Thor Odinson. Lord of Storm and War.” Loki glides forward, his presence seeming to fill this entire alien world with nothing but himself. “And while the Allfather sleeps, he remains the now and future King of Asgard.”

Then he drops to bended knee, one hand clasped to his breast and head bowed low. Such a position leaves Thor unable to see his face – and it hurts, for even in that brief approach he had seemed half a stranger. They have not been so long apart. But Loki is not in Asgardian armour, whether battle or court. His hair has lengthened, and he wears soft silk and a thick fabric that clings to the long lines of his leg though the loose length of his shirt shields his abdomen.

Then he looks up, and again in those wide green eyes Thor feels as though he knows everything. “He is _my_ king.” The whisper pure possessive promise, and Thor cannot look away.

“So, yeah. _Definitely_ a stand-in for Fabio.” The faceplate of the helmet flicks up of its own accord, revealing a man both bearded and beleaguered. “Should have brought Romanov with us; this really looks to be one for the ladies.”

But Loki pays the warrior in his shining armour no heed, and so neither will he. Thor simply extends his palm and Loki places his hand in it. His fingers close tight, pull up – there’s a sudden violence in the way they are dragged together, but it is simply how things always are between them. Loki is in his grasp now, and that ought be enough: but he cannot help but resent the time they have been apart.

“I never gave you permission to go,” he says, harsh and low. Loki gives only a soft snort. He has never been one to show fear in the face of his brother’s rages, even when they’d been so much younger and Loki so much smaller.

“And I never realised I required it, when I acted in the greater interests of both Asgard and one of her most ancient of protectorates.” Their voices are scarce loud enough to be heard by any other, and Loki goes on in that some conspiratorial tone as he leans close. “I might have waited, had you not been so taken with your battle with Vanlandi.”

“That was more than a moon-turn ago!”

“And I have been here for some time,” Loki says, now matching Thor’s increased volume; when Thor’s hand tightens, he gives a faint shrug as if it could never possibly hurt him despite the inevitable bruises already left. “And I have been here in your name, as it were. …you must let me explain.”

Thor’s words might have split the sky asunder, had he willed it. “Yes. I rather think you must.”

“And so I shall.” Loki’s answering smile is the kind that speaks of gaps in the fabric of the universe through which even the most robust of realities might slip; it seems even the dull mortal senses know of such chaos, for the red-armoured man steps forward with his glowing hands held high in conciliatory demand.

“Whoa, wait a sec, here.” Turning to Loki, he lets his mouth run away with him with never quite as much grace as Loki himself might. “Are you in trouble? Because if so, can we move this to the room SHIELD made for this sort of shit? Because I have all sorts of toys just a corridor over that I’d really rather not—”

“It will not be an issue. You will just have to excuse the manner of his entrance. He’s…never been particularly accustomed to knocking on doors.” As smooth as his interruption, Loki curves his head towards his brother. “I’ve attempted to…train him otherwise since childhood, but even I have been unable to find any manner in which to make such a lesson take hold for more than perhaps half a moon’s turn.”

“Oh.” The mortal’s gaze moves switches between them; there’s something speculative in there that Thor cannot quite appreciate. “You two really are…old friends, then?”

“Very old friends.” Loki’s voice might have been bland, if not for the rich smirk he wore over it. “And very _good_ friends, as it were.”

The Stark man seems to be turning that over and searching for the seams; though Thor cannot blame him for doing so, some part of him resents it. He knows as well as anyone that Loki’s words cannot often be taken at face value, but he does not like the mortal already being so quick to search out a lie, white or otherwise.

It does not help, he thinks with an added frown, that nothing Loki has said thus far speaks of their brotherhood. As if catching his thoughts, plucking them from his mind, Loki lets a hint of mischief light his eyes. One hand moves to rest upon his belly, the loose shirt shifting but not sinking as far as it ought; a moment later, Thor’s eyes widen at the unmistakable swell of his abdomen. Of their company, Sif his only real concern – still Thor cannot do anything but move forward, going to one knee to rest his forehead upon the back of Loki’s hand like a knight to his liege-lord.

Sif gives a strange, startled little gasp; it is all but unnoticed in the Stark man’s sudden bark of laughter. “Is that a traditional Asgardian greeting?” he asks, even as Loki gives a little titter of his own. “Because no offense, Loki, you’ve proved yourself a fine upstanding god of chaos and catastrophe and all, but I’m not snuggling up to your belly just to say _hi_.”

“I would not ask it of you, Mr. Stark.”

“Not sure if that’s an insult or a relief.” His fingers seem to itch to run back through his hair, though the helm he still wears precludes any such motion. “And I don’t know why I’m surprised after six weeks in your company, but is that a _Valkyrie_?”

“Down, Sif,” Loki says, amused even as Thor rises to give Stark a strange look of his own. “She is not a Valkyrie, I’m afraid.”

“Oh.” He casts another look up, down, then up again. “Disappointed.”

“Though I am certain she would be more than happy to escort you to one of your mortal realms of the dead should you continue to speak of her as if she were mute and unable to do as much for herself.” Stark’s eyes widen, but Loki has already turned to her to dip a half-bow somewhat more obsequious than is his usual wont as second prince of Asgard. “Lady Sif, it is a pleasure to see you in the company of our majesty.”

“Yes, well, you know,” she says, not at all flustered by his smooth sycophancy; she’s known him too long for that. “Someone must keep an eye on him in your absence.”

“You two are bros, right?”

Thor’s frown stops his immediate response though Loki speaks over him anyway, smooth as the silk of his unfamiliar clothing. “We have shared many an adventure together. This war I have described to you, however, was not something I would habitually be involved in – at least, not in the same sense as the warrior king and his armies.”

“Not much need for mischief and lies on the front, then?”

“Not in this case, perhaps.” One hand moves low by his hip, the sharp jerk of his fingers demanding silence; Thor bites his tongue, reminds himself this is Loki’s game even as his brother goes onward. “My need was elsewhere. I do have…a very clever tongue. And the politics of any war take place far behind the battlelines.”

“With wine and cheese and wenches, perhaps?” The mortal seems to be struggling with a conundrum between nobility and a more deeply ingrained appreciation for self-preservation. There is a tale there, Thor realises, one worthy of song and story, but already the man is brushing it aside with his easy agreement. “You know what, I can totally get behind that.”

“It is not quite the paradise you imagine it to be, O Merchant of Death.” Loki’s arms have folded over his chest, the loose fall of his shirt disguising utterly what Thor has so barely felt beneath. “And it would be fair to say that I came here…without the exact permission of my monarch.”

Before the red-armoured man can speak Thor frowns deeper, tongue rolling over words like primed lightning as yet unstruck. “ _God of Mischief and Lies_ ,” he intones at last, and when he looks up his fingers have long since tightened over Mjölnir’s imperfect handle. “ _That_ is what they call you?”

Loki’s grin widens, curves inward with secret amusement even as his words are innocence itself. “Is it so very inaccurate?”

“There is more to you than that.”

“And there is much more you and I should…speak of.” One hand comes to lie over his forearm, and even beneath the weight of his armour Thor can feel the promised familiarity of Loki’s milk-pale skin. Then he turns, light and almost careless when he addresses the armoured man. “You really must excuse us. It has been some time since my king and I have spoken, and…as I have said, I am in some disgrace.”

“Coulson’s going to want to know about this,” the man says, though it seems too amused to constitute much of a warning. In turn, Loki scarcely raises one eyebrow.

“Surely he has been watching all proceedings unto this very moment.”

“Yeah, but you know how he loves to debrief us all to tears.”

“And here I thought you had a fresh Pokémon game for the next one.”

“Already finished it.” It seems it should be impossible in such cumbersome gear, but the Stark mortal raises his armoured shoulders in a fluid shrug. “Had a conference call with Fury yesterday morning.”

“Oh, dear.” It’s clear that Loki has no sympathy to spare, his body moving towards Thor’s like falling water curving towards a lodestone. “You must find some other way to amuse yourself in the interim then – though we shan’t be long. I simply wish to make my most formal apologies in…a more private capacity.”

The dark eyes narrow, the mobile mouth moving with easy suspicion. “He’s not got some great snake with him, has he? Because I don’t do well with snakes. Even if you’re the one on the receiving end of the venom, or whatever.”

“He bears no serpent that need concern you, Mr. Stark,” he says, and Thor’s on the verge of hissing a warning to control his runaway tongue when Loki turns to him with a smile that threatens to swallow him whole, heart and soul alike. “Come, my king, and I will explain to your royal heart’s content.” Even as he holds out one arm for Thor to seize as he will, Loki gives his companion an arch look. “Sif, perhaps you would do Mr. Stark the honour of your company?”

The exact nature of Loki’s current game is unknown to them both; it is a sign both of her training and their long association that Sif is poker-faced as she steps seamlessly into her role. “If our king is content, and it is his will.”

Thor is more hesitant. But Loki’s hand is warm over his and he crooks an elbow to take it in brotherly knot. “It will be well,” he says with a formality a tad too stiff for their own long fellowship; he keeps it there even as he nods to his brother. “Come, Loki.”

“Oh, I always do – later rather than sooner, perhaps.” The chuckle in his voice cannot be anything save unmistakable as he steps forward, the clever courtier’s manner of leading when he seems instead he follows. “But I will come for you, your majesty, never doubt that.”

Not one of the many guards who had accompanied both the red-armoured mortal and Loki himself leave the place where Thor and Sif had entered. They do pass several more mortals on their quick-step passage through winding corridor and down staircase; their gawking eyes follow both princes with no small wonder. Thor ignores them all, eyes forward. Nothing matters to him but the shimmering presence at his side, alive with magic and with mischief as he guides him ever onward.

The chamber he chooses for them is small, utilitarian; there is little to it, beyond a table and two chairs, and not a window in sight. Loki catches his glance about as he closes the door, latches it with an unfamiliar mechanism; he’s leaning back against it with languid feline grace when he says: “We are some ways underground. No view to be had, I am afraid.”

“You are all the view I require.”

Loki gives him a look as playful as it is sly. “Oh, but you can play the tourist here. This is not Vanaheimr, after all – there is no war on Midgard.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Oh, is that all you care about?” Lightly given though the rebuke is, Thor can see the lurking beast of doubt and coiled fear behind his brother’s bright gaze. He steps forward. It had been too bold, he knows, to have touched his brother so before both Sif and the mortals. Here, he cannot help but press his hand again to that one true unfamiliarity of his brother’s body, though his eyes are on Loki’s face.

“Tell me, then: you are…well?”

The awkwardness of the question is not relieved in the slightest by the curl of Loki’s amusement upon his lips, which does not reach anywhere near his watchful eyes. “You are of the impression I cannot survive on my own?”

“I did not say that.”

“But you thought it,” Loki counters, and now even his mock smile has slipped away. “Perhaps you even believe it still.” Though he does not step back, it seems no matter of wishing to maintain intimacy; rather, it is more challenge as he leans forward from the waist, sinuous curve against Thor’s armoured torso as he tilts his lips close to his ear and whispers: “Why else would you come running so swift to my side, like a fool man seeking his lost maiden fair?”

Thor turns his head, just a little, just enough; his lips brush against his brother’s as he murmurs his own careful and casual answer. “There is no right answer to this question, is there.”

Again his spine arches – back this time, backward, accompanied by a laugh as light as the ice bred into his blood. “And I say you cannot be taught,” he says, easy mocking wonder; Thor can only sigh, though one hand moves from the curious curve of his abdomen to anchor upon Loki’s hip.

“I came because you called me.”

“But you would have come anyway.” Long fingers work through his hair like the warp to his weft; their mother is the weaver, but then all spiders do learn to spin their webs. “You needn’t have worried,” he adds, soft as he meets Thor’s eyes again. “I have the situation very much in hand.”

Loki is playing a game here and now – Thor knows it. But then that is not so strange. For all there are those who have accused Loki of abusing his brother’s trust and goodwill, Thor has always known his brother will play, and that he himself will more often than not be one of the pieces he moves about his board. Most days, he is content to trust Loki’s judgement. In this moment, however, the gameboard is so alien that he knows he must see it for himself first.

“And what is the situation here?”

Loki’s smile has returned, rich and ripe with potential. “The tesseract is stirring.” His tongue flicks out, slips across his teeth below the line of his upper lip; he scarcely seems aware of it, though his entire body trembles beneath the imagined taste of his words. “It called me here…in much the same way it called the Others.”

“The _Others_?”

“You mustn’t worry. I took care of them, with the assistance of these peculiar mortals.” Thor’s curiosity is a furious thing, an awakened beast; Loki is waving it back as if it were no more than a kitten roused from slumber. “It was not so very difficult. I stay only because things are not quite finished. They cannot yet quite defend themselves against the troubles they have caused themselves in their fooling about with that which is beyond their mortal comprehension.”

And now Thor cannot do anything but close his hands about his shoulders, as he had wished to do when they had not been alone. “And so you appoint yourself their lord protector?” he asks, voice deepening, harsh and hoarse with a frustrated anger he had not wished to show to the mortals. But he will give it to Loki – he will give _all_ to Loki, leaning forward until they are separated by a mere breath. “Asgard has need of you.” He pauses, then: “ _I_ have need of you.”

“As I have need of you.” The palm of one hand rests upon his cheek, like a cool cloth against fevered brow, for all the heat seems brightest in Loki’s eyes. “But this is beyond you and me – and, too, beyond Asgard and Vanaheimr.”

“And Jötunheimr?”

“Even Jötunheimr.” There comes a heaviness in the air, one Thor recognises as Loki gathering the fresh energy with which to weave seiðr; the flash in his eyes speaks of his working even as he murmurs, half to himself: “Although…for a moment, perhaps…”

The press of lips against his own brings the taste of winterfire. How Loki can be cool and afire at the same moment Thor will never know. Not that it matters. Such yearning for knowledge is Loki’s need; Thor’s deepest desire has ever been action, his body in motion. He finds that here and now in this awakening movement against another; here lies the answer he seeks, with one hand upon still-slender waist while the other slides along his jaw. Then, it turns hard, turns seeking as his hand moves back to cup the low curve of Loki’s skull, fingers digging into scalp. There is no horned helm here, not now, just the binding about his lengthened hair; with a growl rumbling through in his chest Thor yanks it free, lets darkness loose.

“Midgard,” Loki whispers, pupils blown wide to leave only the faintest hint of encircling green about his deepest centre. “This is Midgard…so let it be just you and me, then, for the moment.”

A fiercer kiss sparks bright, turns consuming as wildfire. As it blazes upward Thor moves his hands, finds the fine barrier of unfamiliar Midgardian clothing; everything is become awkward, for all it appears so much more simple than his habitual Asgardian attire. But there is nothing of armour to it; he hates that, somehow. Loki is a sorcerer, he does not choose to wage his battles as does Thor himself – but it leaves him uncomfortable, this thought of Loki vulnerable in any sense or form.

_Or is it more you worry that he should feel content, should feel trust amongst others who have not your strength? When he carries your child? Do you not trust him?_

The doubts of his mind are spoken in Loki’s voice, and though he has craved his brother’s counsel so often in recent days now he wishes only to push it all aside, to take it all back – if only it means he can now have again that skin beneath his fingers again, to remember what it is to be at one with himself. For Loki is under his skin. Even when apart he lives inside his every heartbeat, and Thor wishes nothing more than to live within him forever.

His own skin is tingling, alive; Loki’s hand has locked about his. With it he feels a sensation of being dragged, tide pulling away from the shore. Instinct has him following it – but then Loki draws back, draws away. Thor opens his eyes, his mouth in protest.

Sound evaporates when he meets those watchful eyes. They have moved, he thinks, but he cannot be sure; his focus is upon Loki alone as he nods. Then a hand raises, long fingers grasping his chin. The expression upon Loki’s face, held within his eyes, is one Thor has known well all their lives; coiled mischief, simply waiting for the opportune moment to strike. Loki has always been about reaction, about provocation. Trusting to that need Thor allows him to turn his head, just a little; and his eyes widen. They _have_ moved, just by a matter of metres. But they have also stayed the same – or at least a part of them remains at the point this began. It is like staring at the sun, an afterimage burned onto retina. But it is not static. It is ever-moving. It continues where they have ended, the ouroboros made whole.

His double has no more idea than the true Thor of how to divest Loki of his Midgardian shirt and trousers. It does not matter. The twinned Loki leans back and, as always, he does for Thor what he cannot take the time to learn for himself. Nimble fingers make quick movement over slight buttons; then comes a roll of shoulders, and the silk whispers over skin and to the floor, forgotten before it even touches ground. The eyes of both double and original are drawn instead to the pale chest, bared and half-hitched with quick breath – and then eyes move down, tracing the unfamiliar curve of his belly. Early though these days are, given his lithe natural state it is pronounced enough for Thor’s fingers to twitch, wanting only to reach forward. But he stands apart, silent and watchful, the ache of his desire like a fresh-wrought wound as his double’s hands move from waist, splaying outward like it is the world held between his palms.

The wicked curve of the doubled Loki’s grin is so very like his favoured throwing knives. Fingers hitch into the waistband of his trousers, pushing down; long legs move with easy grace as he steps free. Yet he does not return to the other Thor’s arms. Instead he braces his hands, the lean muscles of arm working as he levers himself up onto the bench at his back. One long leg crosses over the other, single palm coming over that growing swell of abdomen. Below, his cock already forms a curve of its own, heated blood hardening flesh further still as fingertips move in light dance.

“Much as I do wish to bow before my king, to serve him true – and much as you are suited to be so attired in your regal finery,” the double murmurs, words as lazy as his curving fingers, the arch of his spine as he drives his cock deeper into their circling pressure, “given the situation, you seem…somewhat overdressed, for this occasion.”

A low growl erupts from his double’s throat; it goes straight to Thor’s own groin. What follows is both the work of moments and eternity. The armour clatters to the floor, one piece after the other like a puzzle in reverse and yet what is revealed seems more complete for having all the extraneous matter peeled clean away. Clad only in golden skin, the double strides forward to opened arms and opened legs. His head dips, the mouth dipping to press against welcoming hum of lips and tongue. All close about him, drawing him near, enfolded and possessed. Then those lips, forming words that are motion more than sound, drift from silenced mouth to throat, tongue darting out to flicker over the pulse that must quicken to match.

But Loki’s double is no passive marionette. The clever hands crest over hip, curve tight about clenched buttocks. The fingers carve deep grooves, seemingly unsatisfied even when hips grind together. A low choke works free of the growing knot of his throat; he _knows_ how it must feel, to press desire against need in such a fashion. Thor’s own cock hardens as the doubles rock against one another, pleasure radiating from them in waves to match their low voices, all sound and no words. A living memory made flesh, and Thor cannot look away even when the reality stands before him – for it is the reality that has wrought this illusion, reminding him of all that he had lost in the moons they have been parted.

A gentle scrape of nail reminds him of said reality. Then the fingers tighten and Thor’s face is drawn around. “I think that is enough for the moment,” Loki murmurs, and his lower lip is drawn in, flicker of teeth in the dim light, spark of amusement in his eyes. Then: “We’ll leave them to it.”

Sense has never seemed so far from his clumsy grasp. “But…what is the point of this?”

“Distraction.” The tips of Loki’s fingers move over Thor’s cheek, then one finger presses against his lips as if to ask for silence. “But not one intended for you.”

“Loki—”

“The mortals have not a guardian such as Heimdall,” he says, pressing down hard enough to hurt, “but they have eyes other than their own with which to see.” Even as he releases that pressure, his shoulders move in a light slide beneath the loose silk of his Midgardian shirt. “However, they have yet to distinguish science from sorcery. They see only them, and not us.”

Confusion draws his brows downward, together; a flicker of annoyance already fans itself from ember to growing flame. “So this little demonstration has been all for _their_ benefit?”

The rich flavour of his jealousy seems to be a meal his brother has missed dearly; by the gleam of his eyes, he feasts deep upon it now. “Come walk with me,” Loki murmurs, rich chuckle reverberating low in his chest, echoing about the chambers of his quickened heart. “And we shall talk in the privacy we are due, as gods amongst mortals.”

In the space beside them, Thor’s fetch groans, drives forward; the Loki in his arms keens high and hard. Thor knows that cry, its cadence and its cause. It comes only of the movement of cock into flesh that welcomes even as it always hesitates, just a moment, pleasure heightened by the slightest edge of pain. And his hands are fists and his breathing hard as the double pushes his head back, throat bared, and whispers like a prayer: _Thor_.

“Oh, brother,” says the true one, light laughter like a prickle of loosed lightning across his dry and fevered skin, “you can be such a _child_. Your turn will come soon enough. Must you always be so impatient?”

“And must you always tease me so?”

“Yes.” One hand moves about his chin. Not even the sound of gasping breath, the doubles stilled, can draw Thor’s attention from Loki before him. And the word sits ill in his mind. Though it is not the affirmative that troubles him. He simply cannot believe Midgard will view a relationship such as theirs any better than would Asgard.

And there it is again, that strange feeling that Loki has learned to read his mind as easily he would one of his spellbooks. “Thor,” he says, serious and sudden and no the less honest for it, “I have never told them that you are my brother.”

And for all their doubles move still, memory in motion, Thor himself is motionless. Loki’s smile turns secret, and his eyes seem to fill this entire alien world upon which they now stand together.

“Here,” he whispers, with promise and pleasure alike, “in this realm, you and I can be whatever we wish.”

It is work enough for him to keep up with his brother’s machinations even without the fingers wound through his, and the sound of their coupling moving like true sensation over skin and into bone. “But…they have stories of us.”

“And they are wrong, for the most part.” Something passes over his eyes, like a shadow before the sun; then it is gone, replaced by amusement that could be true just as much as it could have been a lie. “In fact one of the prevailing thoughts seems to be that _Odin_ and I are brothers,” he adds, musing now even as the intensity of his eyes seems to suggest there is nothing else in all the realms but they. “But we have our adventures, you and I.” The sound of flesh upon flesh, slick and sensual, is but mere punctuation to a truth that needs no embellishment. And he laughs, low and lewd, and Thor feels as though he trembles upon a precipice with only Loki to hold him back from the final fall. “So come with me, now.”

He speaks it as command, almost – and though Thor himself does not, not yet, the double throws his head back and presses deeper in. The orgasm is not his own, is but a shadow of what he would feel himself when buried to the hilt in the writhing body of his brother. The power of it reverberates through him all the same, powerful borrowed pleasure. Loki’s double rocks hard, hands scrabbling for purpose, voice low furious growl as he seeks his own release; a moment later he is rewarded by the strong jerk of Thor’s hand upon his illusory cock. Thor closes his eyes, Loki’s shriek like a clarion call to arms deep in his soul.

“But…your distraction is finished already.”

Loki’s laugh rises above the gasp of his double in orgasm, perfect harmony over the dying melody. “Do yourself some credit, Thor,” he chortles, “he will be ready again soon enough.” And as he curves closer, arm about his waist as he steers them towards the door, it is his trickster tongue that whispers sly and slick into his ear: “…and you should know by now that I have a very overactive imagination…and in more ways than just the one.”

The ripple of seiðr over his skin flickers fierce and ravenous as they step literally through the door, given Loki snubs of the tradition of opening it first. Such things come as naturally as breathing, to Loki; for Thor it is uncomfortable, like learning to walk while having an older person move one’s legs for them.

“The illusion will keep them amused,” Loki offers as they begin to move elsewhere, the corridors too bright with the artificial light so favoured by these mortals. It is harsh against the brightness of Loki’s own eyes when he gives him a sly sideways look. “Though I would rather have liked to have seen their faces.”

“You named me Odinson,” Thor says instead, and his hand just ghosts over the rounded end of Mjölnir’s handle. “So what then did you name yourself?”

“I am Loki.” He gives it simply, knowing of Thor’s reluctance. There’s an element of teasing, however, when he adds with casual carelessness: “Though I suppose if I feel the need I might call myself Laufeyson.”

“ _No_. You mustn’t.” Thor reaches for Loki, even as he darts just out of reach, never once breaking stride. “You are my brother.”

“I am the blood of royal Jötunheimr,” he counters, still leading him ever onwards and never once looking backward. “They left me to die while the Allfather gave me life, but never forget what he knew when he took me.”

Thor stops dead. “What?”

“I carried in me the potential to end his house.” Loki turns, tilts his head. “Did you not realise that?”

A shiver moves through him like the slow curve of a calving glacier. “If he had been so very worried of what you might grow to be, then why did he not simply dash your head against a wall of that temple that very moment?”

Loki’s shoulders move in fluid slide beneath his shirt. “My own father couldn’t do it. How should we then expect it of Odin Borrson?”

“But he wasn’t your father then.”

“But he was still the Allfather.” Impatience enters his voice, and one hand extends with the fingers crooked. “Come, Thor, I have no wish to speak of such matters now. You wish to know of what I am doing here, no?”

Thor looks about even as their pace does not slow. “You are certain this is private.”

“Yes, if you’ll just come a little further.” They’re taking another corridor, this one small and silent, when he adds: “Do not worry about the others…though if I know Stark, Sif’s likely to have smacked him hard across the face by now, actually.”

“Would that be an issue?”

“I am of the impression most people of Mr. Stark’s acquaintance wish at one point or another to punch him upside the head. I am sure he would not think Sif to be the first exception to the rule.”

Loki is by now coaxing open another door; they step through together, and in this space Thor sees little more than a low simple bed and a slender closet. Even as he surveys their surrounds, he cannot help another edged question. “You are…friends with this Mr. Stark?”

“Acquaintances, perhaps.” Having secured the door Loki comes about, stands before him. “In all honesty I would not name any one of them true _friend_.”

Thor feels a sudden fierce gladness – but there’s a sadness in it, seasoned too with guilt. Loki has never been one to make friends easily; those few he had ever had were more often than not shared with Thor. The only friend Loki had had truly divorced from Thor had been Amora, and Thor cannot claim he does not still feel pleased that the two have apparently fallen out almost for good.

Still, Loki surprises him but a moment later. “I must admit a certain fondness for Agent Barton, however. He tried to put an arrow through my eye when first we met.”

“He did _what_?”

Loki laughs in the face of Thor’s sudden fury. “He was well within his rights, let me assure you. I bear him no grudge – and neither should you.”

“I should like to meet him.”

“While grinding your teeth in such a fashion? I think not.” Loki’s amusement dies down, and there’s quiet demand in him when he draws close, places a restraining hand upon the roundel above his heart. “But he saved my life, once – or at least, I gave him cause to believe he had. We are even, as such things go. So you too, let it go. I would not have you harm him.”

Thor purses his lips. There are greater matters, after all. “That does remind me – you spoke of these _Others_.”

“Yes. I did.”

And how like Loki, to volunteer so very little information of his own while drawing him ever onward. “You knew they were here, and came to Midgard because of them.”

“I came to Midgard because of the tesseract,” Loki corrects, so easily slipping into the didactic mode he favours when trying to both teach and to tease his elder brother. “The Others came in their wake. The mortals had…engendered some interest, from realms other than theirs or our own, because they have been larking about with it in their own idiot fashion.”

Scorn drips from every syllable. Loki has always had little patience with those who could not keep up with his mind; it is but one reason why Thor has never thought to ask him to teach him anything of seiðr. The greatest one had been a lack of interest. Thor has Mjölnir, and the knowledge of how to channel and control the power she both grants and amplifies is soul-deep, something gifted to him by birth, mighty god of thunder and storm. For one of the few times, however, he now regrets having had such contempt for such lessons when offered him.

“So you descended to Midgard and took on a threat alone?”

Loki raises a brow, purposefully nonchalant. “I wasn’t in any danger.”

“You don’t know that.” Though they have argued more times than most can imagine in their long lives, Thor strives for something like diplomacy as he goes on. “Brother, I respect your abilities—”

“ _Think_ for a moment, please,” he interrupts, and in that there is found the memory of childhood, of a thousand times and more the younger had had to teach the elder. “I was never in any danger.”

Thor opens his mouth to protest it. The light in Loki’s eyes burns brighter, and he closes it, lets the truth come over him in a cold wave of realisation. “You manufactured the threat,” he says, flat.

“Indeed I did.” Even as Thor’s disbelief grows, his glee is undiminished. “Come, brother, I needed to gain their trust.”

“Through deception? These are your allies!”

Loki snorts, though still he laughs. “I could have simply taken the tesseract from them. Would you have preferred that?”

“It seems to me there would have been more honour in outright thievery than manipulative trickery!”

Sudden disdain moves over his features, lips thinning to almost nothing. “Thor, consider this – we are at war with Vanaheimr. And as it stands, should they learn of the Allfather’s ill-thought action of snatching a bastard of the royal line from the holy temple, then diplomatic relations with Jötunheimr are sure to hit a new all-time low.” When Thor moves to protest, he cuts him dead with a hand swung like an executioner’s sword. “I would rather _not_ incite Midgard against us. For all they are mortals, I am now more than certain they could cause mischief enough should they want to.”

“But you can’t just steal it from them,” Thor says, and Loki blinks.

“Why not?” His smile is sly, and filled with teeth. “It was never theirs to begin with, and they know not what they toy with.”

“If it were that simple you already would have done it,” he mutters, and Loki’s eyes widen.

“Ah. Very clever.” Taking a step backward, he opens his hands and gives a light shrug. “If it had been dormant, as had been its state when the Allfather had left it here some decades ago by their reckoning, it would have been the matter of mere moments to slip into its vault and take it back.” Annoyance colours his words with dark pulsing crimson, like venous blood spilled by a careless blade. “But they have wakened it from its slumber of centuries, and it is not so easily moved in such a state.”

“Why is that?”

“I might explain as such to you,” he says, careless, “but it would be a waste of breath.”

“Loki!”

“You would not understand, and you know it.”

This constant back and forth makes Thor’s head spin, and he feels as if he has not stood upon solid ground since the Bifröst snatched him from the observatory. “I am your king,” he says, teeth held so tight together his jaw begins to ache; Loki’s smile is oddly sweet.

“And I am your subject,” he says, and shakes his head in a disappointment that almost feels paternal. “You must trust me. _Think_ , again. You have already proven to me more than once today that you can follow this far enough to know for yourself what I do.”

Thor takes a long breath, lets it go. “You seek to push it back to dormancy before you take it?”

“Very good.”

In the expectant silence, Thor tightens one hand over Mjölnir, adds: “And in order to gain their trust and assistance in doing so, you have offered your services to them as advisor and protector.”

“You needn’t look so sour, Thor – the very best lies are wrapped tight about a kernel of truth.” Pushing a hand back through that too-long hair – how he itches to take one of Loki’s many knives, and cut it back to how it had been! – Loki shrugs. “At the very least, I have given aid in controlling the thing. Without it, it would have eventually done what I initiated. I just gave the gentlest of pushes.” There is something dangerously close to relish in his words now. “Had I left them to their own foolish devices, the result would have been a deep tear across the weave of reality itself.”

“And so you save them from the darkness only you might perceive?”

He blinks, as if wounded by Thor’s sceptical tone. “I am saving them from themselves, as a matter of fact.” His voice hardens. “And in that, I will save us and our realm, too.”

“And what good does the tesseract do for us?”

“It remakes reality.” This time Loki seems almost glad for Thor’s obvious ignorance. “They call it an energy source. It is not. Better to name it a catalyst, of a sort. It offers in return for what it takes the reflection and amplification of our own deepest desires, though it can take any strong emotion and make of it what it will.” Thor’s confusion grows even as Loki’s eyes go distant, drifting upon a distant stream of consciousness. “It creates nothing. It merely takes the pieces offered upon its Eldritch altar in order to reconstruct a whole greater than the sum of its pieces.” Then he looks back, his pupils wide and his irises green struck through with gold. “You cannot make anything from nothing, Thor. But you can make everything from even the smallest of somethings.”

The low words shiver over his skin like coming winter. “This comes of the prophecy?”

“Rather call it our destiny.” He shakes himself then, as if shucking the mantle of a secret reality only he might walk the dark paths of; when he looks up, his pupils have narrowed and his smile has returned. “I have this well in hand, Thor. You should return to Asgard, and then to Vanaheimr, and trust to me to bring the tesseract when it is advisable to do so.”

“You should be in Asgard.” His words are flat, uncompromising. “It is where you ought always to be. Upon Hliðskjálf.” One hand moves out, then the other. “I wage war, and you hold the homefront.”

“As what? Your queen?”

“My king upon the throne,” he counters Loki’s contempt, and the weight of his low words is greater than even the greatest roll of thunder. “And I your king upon the storm.”

It would be only natural for Loki to argue back. Instead, he turns inward: thoughtful, watchful. Thor’s body shudders with the sudden memory of his weight upon him when he had taken both the throne and his brother; Loki drifts close, presses one long finger over his lips as if to hold them closed. “It is not yet time to speak of such things,” he says, sounding very nearly sorrowful as his eyes search his. “But I always do underestimate you, I fear.”

“What do you mean?”

“And then…I think perhaps I do not.” He turns away, and Thor does not know if he had found what he had looked for. Still, he says: “Let me do this for you, Thor. Mother will act as regent in my place, and I will secure the tesseract.”

“But already they call you the god of lies,” Thor protests, and for all the truth of the epithet it is still bitter upon his tongue. “Can you be so sure they will fall for your tricks?”

“You have known me for a liar since I was a child barely breeched, Thor. And still you fall for any trap I beckon you into.”

“But I trust you,” he says, unable to argue something as easily proved as all that. “Can you say the same for them?”

“Perhaps not.” Then he appears to give it more thought. “Well…some more than others, yes.”

“Who does not trust you?”

The curve of his smile does not seem meant for Thor. “He’s very quick, is Agent Barton.” One hand dips low, fingers tapping low lullaby across the stretching skin beneath the silk. “He was the first to suspect I was with child, and still he is the only one who knows it as a certainty.” When he speaks next, he gives a scoffing little laugh.  “Although I suspect he’ll have little trouble convincing Stark of it now, after your little display earlier.”

“How does he know?”

“I believe he said something along the lines of _I guess the circus must’ve given me a nose for freaks_.” Loki’s hand falls, and he turns slightly, eyes narrowed upon the nondescript bed that takes up perhaps a quarter of the room. “I think more it is that he has a fondness for broken things. Or at least a guilt complex, for having been responsible for several himself. Occasionally he feels the urge to try and fix said things – perhaps because he was given the same chance once for no reason he has ever been able to fathom.” When he glances back, half over one shoulder, he raises a coy eyebrow. “Though I mustn’t give you the wrong impression. He might have a philosopher’s soul, but at heart his default setting appears to be _if in doubt, blow it up_. Or so Stark tells me.”

“You sound…fond of him.”

“Oh, I am.” With a cavalier step Loki sways closer, tongue just tracing the lower line of his upper teeth. “He amuses me. He’s a very quick tongue to his mind, for all he often holds it. But then perhaps that is why I care to hear him more than Stark, who in all honesty is yet to shut up that I have seen.”

“But _how_ does he know?” Loki snorts and in that Thor’s temper gets the better of him once more. “How could he have known?” And he’s moving forward even as Loki comes willingly nearer; his hands move forward, bunching the soft shirt in his fists. In a moment he yanks it apart, buttons falling like hail to the floor beneath. That slight swell of his abdomen is revealed to him now in truth; he looks up, lips white as his knuckles. “Has _he_ seen this?”

He has miscalculated Loki’s own anger; his body is still languid, inviting, but his eyes are deep roiling green fire. “Do you really think me so faithless?” he says, words ending in a harsh hiss; Thor’s fingers clench tighter, draw him close.

“ _Has he_?”

Loki laughs in his face. “You would accuse me of rutting with mortals when I carry your child in my belly?”

Thor’s answer is a growl from low in his throat; Loki laughs harder.

“Why would I lie with mortals,” he wheezes, “when together you and I can create so much more than that?”

“Did you, or did you not?”

Loki’s laughter cuts off as he had fallen from a great height and only now just hit the ground. “Oh, by the Nine,” he mutters. Then he rears back; before Thor can react, he slaps his brother across the face. Staggering, he lets go; Loki arches back, his own face pale and furious. “Call that punishment, for daring to insult my virtue,” he snaps back, immediate defence; Thor’s own hand presses to his cheek, finding heat there.

“You dare strike your king?”

“I dare strike a fool,” he retorts and for all his anger Thor can see something very like the shimmer of saltwater in his eyes as he turns away. “You should not even be here. Your war is not yet won, and your realm needs you.”

“ _Our_ war. _Our_ realm.” Thor reaches out, does not quite dare touch him. “ _Our child_ ,” he says, and suddenly his own anger is gone as quickly as it had come, brief squall in these uncertain alien skies. “And I need _you_.”

Loki swings around, stares.

“And you invited me!” Thor adds, frustration burning bright. Loki’s own is a quieter thing, reflected deepest in the half-hearted roll of his eyes.

“Perhaps I merely wished to see what you would _do_.” Exasperation adds to the stew of emotion between them, his voice rising high. “Why do you think I ever have you do anything?”

“Because you need it of me,” he replies, almost helpless. And Loki deflates.

“You trust too easily, and too well.”

“You are my brother.”

When he tosses his head, too-long hair storm-tossed and raven-black, the memory of his half-feral mare form strikes like lightning. “In all actuality, I am _not_.”

In that scornful retort Thor senses too an echo of the lucid dream Loki had walked in his mind; he’d spoken then of how he would bring forth the child, had shifted into his hated Jötunn form to punctuate each bitter word. _Although I must be a monster to do so_ , he had said _. I must fall before I can rise._

 “Does that make it easier to walk away from me, then?” he asks, careful upon this thin ice that Loki has danced them both out upon. “Is that how you seek to gain his trust, perhaps? With careless kisses and careful hands?”

His anger cracks all – and Thor regrets the words as soon as they are spoken. It is too late to drag them back, and Loki’s roused fury is the cold dark waters of one of Jötunheimr’s great glacial lakes.

“You think I would offer my body upon their dirty little altars?” he asks, and though his voice is low it begins to spiral upward, soul-shriek. “And why should that be? Oh, perhaps for the way I behaved in Vanaheimr?” Now he laughs, though it is tight twisted sound with nothing of humour about it at all. “Is _that_ how you think of me, brother mine? That that is the reason why I did those things?” Incredulous fury deepens his voice, and his fingers are like claws where they dig now into his arms. In his eyes, Thor sees nothing but agony sharpened to hurt and hunger. “Do you believe that I whored myself to those damned creatures, and so therefore I would do the same upon Midgard when given half the chance?”

“I did not say—”

“And yet still I heard it,” Loki snaps back, and Thor’s fury wins out over his fright.

“Because you twist my words!” he shouts, and Loki’s own laughter is screeched to heavens not their own.

“You twist your thoughts adequately enough on your own!”

“No other’s mind is as tangled as yours. You speak in silvertongue and I have not ever a hope of understanding it.”

“You understand nothing,” Loki mutters, turning his face away in disgust; the silver half-crescent of his face is as much a condemnation as his words. Thor’s hand snaps out, takes him by the throat, jerks him around.

“Because you tell me nothing!” There is both violence and remembered intimacy in his gesture, even as he shakes him like a great cat with her prey tight in her jaws. “ _You_ are the only path to understanding! And yet always you deny me the right to walk it, to know it!”

And now Loki denies him all answer, too. His silence is pure condemnation, and Thor wars between the desire to shake the truth from him – or to coax forgiveness. In the end he can do neither; he lets his hand fall, knows instead again the sting of failure. Every time Loki had been taken from him in Vanaheimr, he had known it. But he had never thought it could hurt so much as this, when they are not even there any longer.

 _But perhaps, in a way, Loki never left_.

“What did they do to you?” he asks, sudden and helpless. Loki’s scowl is alien to his features, a twisted scar upon his once-beautiful features.

“Only what had to be done.”

And in that Thor feels he is fallen, as if the rainbow bridge has cracked beneath his feet, its kaleidoscope song fractured and shrieking. “You _wanted_ it?”

“Why must you be such an idiot?” His face contorts in deep fury, teeth as bare as his soul as he steps close and shouts: “Do you listen to _nothing_ I tell you?”

And for all Thor wishes to do nothing else but shout in return he clenches his fists, takes a step back with a deep breath to match. “I have not your mind, Loki. I have not your knowledge,” he says, low with jaw clenched tight. “I trust in you to tell me what I need know – and are you not listening to me? You tell me nothing!”

And the fact that Thor can hold his temper only for so long seems to amuse Loki deeply; he’s already smirking again. “And so are you king or puppet?”

“Are _you_ subject or puppeteer?”

For a moment Thor thinks Loki flings himself forward to strike him again. Instead it is a furious kiss that he lands upon him, all biting teeth and thrusting tongue. The taste of blood explodes in his mouth as he is shoved backwards, spine slammed hard against the wall: and Loki’s long legs wrap about him, his own hands moving down to hold him close, hold him tight, fingers digging deep into his buttocks both for support and in exploration. Loki leans back, one foot descending like the slam of Gungnir upon the golden marble of Asgard’s throne dais.

“So how shall it be?” he whispers, harsh – and one hand moves around, clenches over his own buttock and pulls their hips together in a thrust that has him gasping, bending forward as if to fall. “You want to fuck me. I know that. But also I know that in turn you wish to be fucked by me. To claim and to be claimed. So make up your damned mind, brother mine, and tell me what you want of me!”

He blinks, half-dazed, not knowing if the blood he tastes is his own. “Why can it not be both?”

At first Loki is stunned to silence. They remain thus: Thor pressed up against the wall, and Loki palms now flat against it either side of his head. His fury remains startled, static: and a moment later, laughter erupts from him like a volcano roused to explosive release.

And in the face of that molten amusement, Thor swallows, shakes his head as much as the bracket of Loki’s hands will permit. “Perhaps I ought to be concerned,” he tries, wry and quiet, “of how you laugh in such a moment.”

“Oh,” he says, tilting his head in mocking apology, “am I not supposed to having a good time?”

“Sometimes I think you have entirely too good a time.”

Something of that amusement slips away, his eyes slipping sideways. “You are a fool, Thor Odinson.” The murmur is like a sigh of words, his eyes slipping closed as if in despair. “How is it, that I am doomed to love a fool such as you?”

Thor raises one hand, closes the fingers about one slender wrist. It is so unusual, to see it clothed in such light covering; even when he wears only the clothes of a prince and a courtier, Loki is still all leather and metal, his pale skin so often hidden save for that of face and occasionally those clever seiðmaðr’s fingers. “Perhaps a fool is the one who loves hard and truest,” Thor offers, uncertain only of his skill with words and not the sentiment of which he speaks. “And longest,” he adds, and at that Loki opens his eyes with wry surrender.

“And we do have forever, you and I.”

Thor swallows, tries again. “Why are we fighting?”

“Because that is what we were born to.” Again, bitterness slips in betwixt his words. “Warrior-king and his sorcerous shadow.”

“Do you not remember?” Thor interrupts, quick though not yet desperate. “Father once told us we were both born to be kings.”

Loki’s eyes widen. A moment later that surprise leeches itself away, but he remains somehow sad now that his fury has gone. “Yes,” he whispers, more to himself than to his brother, “sometimes I think for all I call you blind, you see so much further than I ever will.”

With that Loki steps back. It seems so easy, for him; Thor’s own disorientation is far more difficult to catch control of. The shimmering figure before him has split into two. Before he can speak they move, and then they are there: one with head bowed, the other staring and unafraid. A tongue darts over one lower lip, the accompanying smile careful and curved.

“Is this how you would like it?”

In that sibilant murmur, Thor knows the remembrance of a promise. “I don’t want to watch,” he says, immediate and almost too harsh. “Not now. I’ve had enough of watching.”

That Loki snorts, one hand rising to fan long fingers over the apex of the soft collar of his thin shirt. “Ah, but perhaps I should _make_ you watch, in return for what you have said and thought of me in our long separation.” He presses the palm flat against the revealed skin, teeth pressing over his lower lip; when he releases it, this time his tongue charts swift course over the upper lip. “I’ve always been such a tease, haven’t I?”

“Please.” He scarcely recognises his own voice, his clumsy step forward. “Brother. I have…I _need_ you.”

“And you think I have not needed you?” While the second remains still and silent, the perfect servant, the Loki who speaks crosses arms over his chest and tilts his chin high. “Do you think it easy, for me, to abandon the golden halls of Asgard and descend to Midgard, only able to pass messages and hear news through the words of Huginn and Muninn?”

A sudden thought has him casting one way, then the next; he is not certain Loki would ever call such a humble chamber his own, but he must wonder. “Is Freki with you?”

His eyes roll skyward. “Yes. Freki is with me.” Then he barks out a short, sharp laugh. “Stark actually wanted to adopt him. Called him a direwolf, as a matter of fact. Agent Barton did warn me to make sure I had him, when I go home.”

There’s something in there Thor does not like, a closeness, a sense of something in his brother’s life he has no part in. He supposes that is why he takes another step forward, this one deeply purposeful. “I don’t want to talk of Stark, or of Barton – or of any of your mortal allies.”

“You started it.” One hand presses to his chest, stops his forward movement. Then, as if Thor is the centre about which he turns, Loki moves around, behind him. His next words are dropped quietly into one ear. “Perhaps I should just be flattered, by this jealousy of yours.”

Thor cannot protest his innocence in such things, not then: the other has already begun his own wordless duty. Going to his knees before Thor’s startled eyes he already works at the trousers with clever fingers. The other remains behind him, breath cool upon the curve of his earlobe as he begins to loosen the cloak. “How could I not be jealous?” Thor says finally, words hitched in his throat. “How could anyone look upon you, and not desire to have you always and forever?”

“What if I am not to be had?” Teeth nip careful over one ear, just enough to hurt without drawing blood. “What if I am nobody’s but my own?”

“I am yours.” Even as Loki laughs, low and lilting, he says: “Can you not be mine?”

There comes no answer as he steps free of the loosened boots, the trousers rolled down hip and thigh and calf; he abandons those too. The Loki behind has unfastened many of the armour’s plates already. The one before, on his knees, rises to lift the breastplate and its roundels free. As he does so, the eyes at last rise to meet his. The contact shivers through him, even as the other leans forward. Silk and unfamiliar material move against the naked skin of his back as his arms slide up, elbows curved against hip and hands upon shoulders.

“What if we belong to nothing but fate?” he whispers into his ear, and the light swell of his belly is small and hard against the small of his brother’s back. “What if we have no choice in this? What if we never did, never do, never will?”

“If I did, I would only ever choose you.”

“And they call _me_ the liar.”

Loki’s lips close tight about his, as much a chastisement as an actual kiss. Thor wants to pull back, to protest, but then the other’s lips close about his cock. Swallowing him deep, mouth obedient and open, he flicks his tongue and Thor can do nothing but gasp, push forward even as he seeks ever more. He cannot go far, held tight by the one behind his strength.

“Let him take you,” he whispers, the words sliding like the lazy back and forth of a serpent’s scaled form. “Let him have you.” His hips nudge close, the heat of his own erection harsh even through the material of his trousers. “Let me give you to him.”

Thor has no words of his own. Tongue and teeth move together in a fashion that leave him mute and hazy of vision. Yet Loki himself is always perfect, always clear, the only true thing he can see any longer: white face, wide green eyes, dark hair in light fall about the pointed oval of his face. Everything about him screams of perfect love and trust: and then, the contrast of that sly whisper in his ear, nails dug deep enough to leave ten crescents thickened with blood.

When he comes, his knees wish nothing more than to give out, to bring him down before the only one he would so easily press his face to the floor for. But the one behind holds him as the one before drinks deep. Then he rises. Hands closed about Thor’s own, wordless even as the one behind lets him go.

The Loki of silence and simple smile guides him to the bed. It has nothing of the opulence of their chambers in Asgard, but it does not matter. Thor has only eyes for the jewel that is Loki himself as he brings him down, one hand encouraging him to his back. He remains upon his bare feet, careful hands stripping himself bare. Thor’s cock cannot help but twitch in interest – yet his stamina, divine as it might be, is not up to this again just yet.

For this Loki, it seems no matter. With that same guileless grin he comes onto the bed, lies down at his side. A moment more and Loki is in his arms, silent still; the motion of hands speaks for him instead, seeking memory and making it anew in the familiar curve of muscle and limb.

Drowsy in this post-coital haze, Thor at first simply allows his attentions. Soon enough he is roused again, his own hands moving in easy echo of Loki’s own careful trailing tattoo of need and desire. Then he is moving forward, capturing those wordless lips as he wraps about him; entwined, their kisses soon call the accompaniment of lower motion, their hips moving together. Yet before thrust can become grind, a throaty laugh comes from the space just beyond the two of them.

“Are you ready, then?”

When he looks up, his throat feels as dry as the desert he and Sif had first encountered in this realm. The other Loki stands before them, swathed only in his cloak. A second later one hand flourishes out, and it falls. Even though Thor has another Loki in his arms, naked and wanting, the sight seems as nothing he has ever seen before. The proud curve of a fully erect cock, blush-bright, brings his own to full hardness once more.

“But I am not yet ready,” this Loki says, thoughtful; the other Loki is already sliding from Thor’s grasp, moving forward. In a moment he is on his knees, the standing Loki’s cock all but down his throat. Thor chokes, his heart stuttering to a halt even as his indignation tears free.

“You said—”

“Liesmith?” A haze of desire clouds those darkening eyes as his own lips work his shaft with easy knowing glee. “But then…it’s only a little lie.” A hand flicks out, and upon the palm rests the familiar unguent jar. When he screws it open, hands admirably steady for the indecency of the sucking below, the scent of Iðunn’s holy apples fills the small Midgardian chamber.

“Let us go to our king,” Loki murmurs, one hand upon the head of the other, pushing him back.

The double releases his cock, and then they come to him both. The one who has been beneath places himself between them on the bed; both hands set about their work, closed over both cocks in easy oiled slickness. As Thor gasps, he gives a sly little grin, and then turns; a moment later he is kissing the other Loki, open-mouthed and sloppy, tongues moving in languid play. Then, he is kissing him. It is not enough, though as he leans closer that Loki gives a sly grin, switches back to the other. When he returns, it is different; he moves upon his lap, pulling him around, pulling him down.

Then this Loki lies beneath him like a feast waiting to be consumed, legs opened wide and hips curved upward. One hand moves between them, traces light fingertips over the length of a weeping cock, the sway of his balls, the strange sensitivity of the skin beyond. Thor trembles upon his braced arms and Loki’s lips curve like a fire-sharpened blade. Then they come: the only words he has heard this one beneath him speak since this had begun.

“Fuck me, brother.”

Thor has no thought, and there can be no artifice. He just moves forward. Sheathed to the hilt though he then is, this is but a battle only begun. A raw cry works free of his throat as he pulls back, feels Loki clench down as if to hold him in. Then he pushes in, and pulls back; Loki gives a harsh gasps of his own, longer fingers curving claw-like into the impersonal white of the sheets upon which he lies. Then there are two more hands, hard on Thor’s hips, stilling him.

“This is not finished.” A moment later there comes press against him; slick and hard, the promise of pleasure to follow the pain. “Let me in.”

A moment of sudden doubt breaks through the haze of his pleasure. “Loki—”

“Let. Me. _In_.”

He can offer nothing but surrender – but this is too quick, and the pain startles him into a shout. His arms buckle, and he cants forward, but any further sound is caught and swallowed by the Loki beneath as he rises to catch his mouth, arms winding about his neck to draw him deeper, further into his own willing body. There he lies, still and trembling. He knows he should rise, but the Loki beneath, the Loki who holds him within himself, does not complain of his weight.

“Be of good heart, brother,” Loki whispers behind him. “Now I know for certain that there is no-one else in all the world who could ever take me from you.”

Taking his lips from the Loki below, he gives a keening gasp. “You did not know it before?”

“I merely wished it.” He jerks forward, and Thor gasps as that head moves against that place. “In this, I know it.”

“I had already told you!”

“You are a creature of action, of motion.” Loki’s rhythm is quick, chaotic; Thor cannot help to match it, even as it jerks his own body into the Loki’s below. “All my words are but lies,” he says, panting and breathless, the clauses and punctuation all wrong. “So why should I expect anything else from anybody else?”

“I would never lie to you.”

“I’ll still always expect it.” Even as Thor goes to protest Loki thrusts hard and harsh, pushing all breath and sound from his lungs. “But your body, it cannot lie.” Something of laughter skips haphazard through his words, all strange clause and punctuation as he drives deeper still. “So do not you lie still now, brother. Take, and give, and let it be known here and now that you are mine…as I am yours.”

Though the one beneath has spoken but the once, Thor finds himself wondering: of the two Lokis before and behind, which is the true and which the double?

Then he realises he had already answered it for himself even as he gives, even as he takes.

 _They both are Loki_.

“…I think it storms, outside.”

The bed is too small but Thor feels no urge to move. It is but the two of them now in this hazy afterglow, lying with their limbs tangled ever together. Still, now he must frown. “How do you know? There are no windows here.”

“I can feel it.”

Thor knows what he means. Even had he not been causing it even natural storms prickle across his skin, spark from every nerve ending. “I am the god of such matters,” he says, quiet; Loki’s laugh is almost soundless as his lips moves against his slowing pulse.

“And you are mine.”

The unheard thunder rumbles in the distance as Loki moves against him, and Thor knows the truth even before he gives it voice. “Still you will not come home.”

“I told you, I am not finished here.” Though Thor tightens his grasp Loki levers upward, reaches for his half-ruined shirt. “As you are not finished in Vanaheimr.”

“And neither are you.” He wants to tell Loki to stop as he shimmies the strange thick material up over his slim hips, but he keeps his eyes instead upon his brother’s turned-away face. “Will you ever speak to me of what befell you there?”

And now Loki presents his back, dropping to one knee to begin the laborious collection of Thor’s own armour. “It is nothing to concern you now.”

“Still it does.” Still nude, Thor swings his legs over the side of the bed, lets them hit the floor hard. “They _hurt_ you, Loki. Far more than you will even tell me. How could I not hate them, for that?”

At first Loki gives only silence. When he turns, his expression is peculiar, almost pained. “Thor,” he asks, voice oddly childish, “whose idea was it, to go hunting that day?”

His frown curves deep enough to hurt. “I should not have dragged you along.”

The expression he wears puts Thor in mind of how he had so often looked, when standing once again upon the sidelines of arguments between his elder brother and father. “It does not matter, I think,” he mutters, returning to his collection, and Thor can feel the wall building between them. “The well goes deeper than any of us are permitted to know,” he adds, and Thor’s moving already, on his knees with arms about him and his face buried in the warmth of his neck.

“Yet you would try.”

“I always _try_.” He sounds almost melancholy as he raises one hand, cards fingers through sweat-tangled hair. “Come, brother mine. We have dallied long enough, and there is work to be done.”

Again, there is an echo of their adolescence in the way Loki acts as a valet and assists Thor back into his armour. They then walk the corridors swayed close to one another, returning to whence they had come; long before their surrounds become familiar, Thor can hear that their doubles are still about their work. As they come closer, it is apparent they are not the only ones to notice.

“Still at it, are they?”

Stark startles from where he lurks down one end of the corridor; he turns to face the other man with a squint somewhere between amused and aghast. “Talk about stamina of the gods, yeah?” At another drawn out shuddering groan, he winces. “God, I’m never eating ambrosia ever again.”

“Think that was a Greek thing, actually,” the other man replied. “Didn’t the Norse pantheon have apples of eternal life, or something?”

“Thanks for the mental image. I do not even want to _think_ about what they could be doing with apples in there.”

Loki’s amused grin seems to indicate otherwise – and Thor cannot help but think it’s entirely a-purpose that from within comes an especially loud shout, moving to a high keen. The black-clad mortal winces, shakes his head.

“I fucking knew it, you know.”

“What, that he batted for the other side?” Stark’s laugh is philosophical even as the noise continues. “I’m not exactly surprised either, Katniss.”

“No. Not that.” One hand moves back through his short hair, words deeply thoughtful. “More that he didn’t have permission to be here.”

“God of Mischief and _Lies_ ,” Stark points out, unconvinced. “No-one trusts him as far as they can throw him, Barton, if all those stories are true. And even if they aren’t, they’re probably still a damn good morality story for us little mortals to bear in mind.”

Thor stiffens. But Loki looks fondly at the archer even his hand moves as if fingering a weapon he does not now have to hand. “He’s got some sort of game to play, I know that much. He wouldn’t have come here if he didn’t see some fun in it.”

“And you think lover boy in there knows about all this? That maybe he’s a part of it?”

“Haven’t met him yet, so I couldn’t say.” Barton’s arms have crossed now over his chest, his fingers drumming upon the lean hard muscle of his upper arms. “But from that video, he’s known him long enough to know better…and if even half those crazy legends are true, the god of thunder’s probably our best bet to keep him in check. Wasn’t he the only one Loki backed down from, in that flyting story you wouldn’t stop annoying Loki with?”

Stark shrugs towards the door. “Yeah, maybe – but they seem pretty bros before hos, if you know what I mean.”

“Sex and love don’t always go hand in hand.”

“Oh, so _that’s_ why you and From Russia With Love never—”

One hand rises, blue eyes like daggers. “Don’t.”

“I just—”

“ _Armour piercing arrows_ , Stark.”

That does actually give the mortal pause. He appears to work the connotations of that over in his mind; the closest he comes to any admission of defeat is a muttered: “ _Knew_ I was going to regret giving those to you.”

“I’ll let you rue the day somewhere else.” Jerking a thumb back even as he walks away, he calls back one last parting shot. “When Loki’s not busy, tell him I want to talk to him, would you?”

“I’ll tell him to come join you in your nest, will I?” Stark returns, all easy amusement. “Unless Fabio feels the urge to rip more bodices and claim his little trickster bro some more, yeah?”

“Don’t even go there.”

To his credit Stark does keep any further thoughts to himself, at least until the archer has vanished. Then he looks back to the door, and shakes his head at the sounds still emerging from behind it. “Wonder how much Fury will blow a gasket if I upload that to PornoTube or something,” he muses, then walks away. Thor does not know what it means, but Loki is shaking with silent laughter. The glare he gives his brother ought to have cut him dead, but instead Loki laughs harder.

“This is like the throne room, isn’t it.”

“It absolutely is not.” Rubbing at his damp eyes with his fingers, he adds: “I wanted them to hear.” The mischief in his eyes creeps ever closer to malice. “I wanted them to _know_.”

Their whole lives, Loki has been jealous of Thor’s attention; he supposes it is not so strange, that things are only all the worse now with the way their relationship has evolved. It’s easier to leave it, to move on to something of a deeper import. “You cannot stay here.”

Loki’s laughter dries up the way Vanaheimr mists never do. “Why not?”

“This realm will not protect you.”

The look Loki wears now is clear warning. “Am I so in need of protection, then?”

“I don’t know.” Much as Loki is clearly spoiling again for an argument, Thor finds his own temper wishes nothing more than to just gather Loki close and never let go. Instead he raises his hands, presses the heels of both into the hollows of his eyes. “Loki, that is what frightens me. I just don’t _know_.”

In that darkness Loki comes to him, his long fingers as light upon his shoulder as are the words whispered into his ear. “I have never known you to fear anything,” he says, softer than fading brontide; before he can say otherwise, eyes opening, Loki takes his hand and gives a tug forward that is reminiscent of their passed childhoods. “Come, brother. Let us finish this, and then we can go assess my pet mortals for their suitability to be as my companions.”

He snorts, but in the way Loki had so often allowed Thor to pull them to adventure, Thor now allows his brother to tug him ever forward. “You wouldn’t obey me, if I said they were not acceptable and you were to return home with me.”

“No, I wouldn’t.” He spares a half-grin, mischief almost managed. “But if it would settle your spirits, I will pretend.”

Even as Loki’s hand tightens, he sighs, looks down at that single place where they are physically one. “We have never spoken of names.”

Loki pauses before that moment of passing through the unopened door, eyes curious upon his brother; in those green depths, confusion swells to match. They seem to rarely speak of the child beyond generalities, and his voice is careful when he does now. “It is not yet time for such things.”

“And when will it be time?”

“You will know.”

The easiness of Loki’s conviction shakes him deeper than he can ever understand. “What if I don’t?”

“Then it will not be the lack of a mere name that we need fear.” The flatness of those words shivers through him, but then he is pulling him back into the room where they had first sought their privacy from this alien realm. “ _Come_ , brother.”

In that chamber their doubles lie satiated upon the table, wrapped in one another’s arms as if nothing else in all the realms existed for them. When eventually they disappear, Thor thinks perhaps that had been the one and only truth of their brief reality.

And then he wishes it could be so easy, for them.


	9. Of Thunder Of Spring Over Distant Mountains

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, wow. I'm really, really sorry about how long this took -- though I've been writing this chapter off and on since I published the last, I've been horribly tangled up in trying to work out how to get the damn thing to go in the direction I wanted it to. In the end, this chapter is actually more likely to be _two_ chapters in one, given its length; I'm not really in much mood to try and split it down the middle, however, so my apology for being so late in updating seems to involve giving you a very very bloated chapter to work your way through.
> 
> Again, I apologise if I've just gone completely off the rails; half the reason I struggled was because I wasn't really sure what I needed everyone to know here, and then Thor just went and proved to me that not only is he perceptive, he knows how to _turn that perception to his own use_ after all. So...yeah. It's a very dense chapter with a lot of information, and I can only hope it makes some sense.
> 
> So, if there's even anyone still there reading this: thank you so much for sticking with this story. <3 I don't think you'll ever get to know how much it really does mean to me.

“I don’t recall sending you the memo about this meeting, Stark.”

“You didn’t, thank you very much. I just caught it in my filters.” Leaning back in his claimed chair, Stark braces his laced fingers behind his neck and shrugs; beneath the stretch of his shirt, Thor can see the glow of the curious device hear bears beside his heart. “Hey, if you want me to be a consultant, you gotta give me something to consult _on_.”

Thor is unsure as to how to react to this. The fact Loki’s lips are upturned in a wide smirk gives him no real guidance; Loki might know a good deal about the dynamics of the mortal associates he has fallen in with, but it does not necessarily follow that he feels any particular urge to operate within the parameters of them.

But this is Loki’s game to play. And while he is generally content to let his brother do as he will, in this he wishes to understand more. If Loki wishes to stay, then Thor cannot unmake that choice. But he can find and why, and he has every intention of doing so.

“You are a warrior of this realm?” he asks before the black-clad leader can give further voice to his exasperation. Turning his even gaze upon that mortal, Thor adds in even command: “Then it should only be fitting that he be part of this council.”

The metal man, despite now being dressed in garb of soft materials and sharp creases, looks momentarily surprised. Then he looks back to the other man, rocking forward on his chair just in time to stop himself from toppling over backward. “Hey, so, the king of the castle votes for me. I guess that means I get to stay and play after all?”

“This isn’t his castle.” Fury’s one eye moves from Thor to Stark and back again; there’s an echo of Odin to Thor’s mind here, and not just for the fact both have surrendered an eye in service of their respective worlds. His weighted sarcasm, however, is far closer to that favoured by his brother rather than his father. “And I thought the point of a monarchy means there are no votes.”

“There’s one vote,” Stark says, very nearly cheerful as he jerks a thumb sideways. “The _king’s_ vote.”

“Would you advise otherwise, Commander?”

Loki’s amusement at the staring match that results between man and immortal shivers across Thor’s skin when he lays his hand upon his.

“Oh, for…fine. He stays.” Though Fury’s displeasure only grows when he flicks his attention to the space just beside Loki’s chair. “Though I don’t understand why the damn _wolf_ has to be here.”

Loki’s blink is all innocent flutter. “Why not?”

“I thought we went over the show and tell thing.”

“Hey, it’s bring your pet to day work,” Stark says with cheerful abandon, giving the other mortal with them an arch look. “Although Coulson seems to have forgotten his Legolas.”

Quite engrossed in sorting through his papers, Phillip Coulson gives him little more response than words. “Barton knows when his presence is unrequested and therefore unwarranted.”

“Yeah, but Barton’s probably in the ceiling ducts anyway.” Leaning back again, he fixes his eyes upon the centre, and then moves them in suspicious back and forth. “See? He’s moving all over the place.”

“ _Enough_.”

Stark blinks, then rolls his eyes. “Hey, I didn’t invite the bird. And you have to know, Loki, that I’m not real fond of guys whose best friends are creepy-ass birds.”

Following his gaze towards the far window, Loki’s lips downturn. “Thor, did you bring Huginn with you?”

Thor squints across the room. “How do you know it’s not Muninn?”

“It’s not Muninn.”

“Does anyone plan on telling me why there’s a _crow_ at my window?”

“Raven, Commander.” Loki leans back in his chair, but for all his illusion of ease Thor can see Huginn’s presence disturbs him in a way Freki’s simply never could. “They are the emissaries of the Allfather.”

“The sleeping king.” At the _look_ this earns him from Stark, Thor just frowns. “He dreams while the worlds turn.”

“Sometimes we see more clearly in dreams than we do in the waking world.” Thor stiffens, but Loki leans back, unperturbed. His smile is a secretive thing, and Thor glances back to the ever-watchful raven.

“Then where is Muninn?”

“On an errand, I should imagine. Where is Geri?”

“Disembowelling scouts as they stray, I should hope.” Freki looks up, hopeful, and Thor cannot keep in a brief chuckle as he leans across to ruffle up the wolf’s thick fur. “Do not fret, friend Freki – your brother will save you some, I promise.”

“Because you know all about saving things for a sibling,” Loki murmurs, just low enough that it seems likely the others had not heard; Thor leans back from leaning over Loki, finds his smile is all sharp promise.

From across the table, Agent Coulson coughs lightly. “Gentlemen, if we could begin…”

“Yes, of course.” But even after he commands Geri from the room – Huginn makes no effort to do the same, and no-one seems inclined to challenge the sharp eyes – Loki says nothing more to encourage discourse. It is Coulson who must bridge the gaps of conversation.

“So.” He taps a stylus against the curious mortal record-keeping device in his hands, the beat tight and sharp. “ _You_ are the king, and _you_ are his subject who wasn’t supposed to go haring off out of the kingdom. But what’s… _this_ between you?”

“We are companions.” When he smirks, there is such promise in the gesture that Thor feels his groin tighten. “ _Intimate_ companions, as it were.”

“That’s a new one on the myths,” Stark remarks, already having risen to begin a search through the conference room’s small minibar. “I mean, bros before hos, sure, but you two look to be foregoing the ladies entirely.”

“I’ve explained before that your myths are often wrong.” And the long-suffering expression Loki wears takes Thor back to many a long and slow shared lesson in childhood. “Take, for example, Thor – yes, his sire is Odin Allfather, but his mother is Frigga.”

“Not Fjörgyn?”

“No.”

Thus vindicated, Tony turns to Fury with a wide smirk. “ _No study_.”

There’s a long story in there, Thor is sure, but Loki’s amusement is easily read. “Given the sources of your study, Mr. Stark, I would not be too proud of your little victory.”

“Well, so who are your parents, then?” Even as Loki’s smile begins to clearly dissolve, Stark goes blithely onward. “Because going by the myths, you’re like half-giant or something like that.”

“My parents are of little concern.” Clipped and quick, Loki casts his eyes sideways, as if seeking sudden anchor. “You should concern yourself more with the situation we are in now.”

“So this is all to do with the tesseract.”

“Of course.” And he almost laughs. “We are at war.”

The agent and his commander are already at attention; it is Stark who jerks upward, eyes sudden and wide. “What?”

“Loki speaks of Asgard, friend Stark,” Thor says, and even as he gets a very peculiar look at the mode of address, he turns his attention to the black-suited commander. “It is not a matter that need concern your realm – the disagreement is between Vanaheimr and Asgard. No-one is seeking to involve Midgard.”

“You’re the king and you’re sitting at my table,” the man replies, motionless. “How exactly is that not involving us?”

Loki stirs again, deceptive ease in his casual words. “You sought to involve yourselves.”

This appears to be an old argument, given the too-quick exasperation of Fury’s reply. “With the tesseract?”

“I have explained this to you before, although admittedly not at any great length.” Loki seems both pleased and not with his admission, even as he adds: “You have awakened it, and it…attracts attention.”

“Such as the creatures you aided us in fighting off.” There’s distinct irritation in his voice when he asks: “Were they from Vanaheimr?”

“No.” He then side-eyes his brother. “Svartálfaheimr, actually.”

Given how little information he’s received about this skirmish from all fronts, Thor wants nothing more than to press for detail. But then, there are often mercenary bands that might originate from any realm – though it unsettles him to think of the dark elves taking any interest in what is going on between Vanaheimr and Asgard. All current intelligence reports claim they have chosen to stay out of matters. But then Loki could be lying. Shaking his head, taking heart in the fact Loki is both healthy and hale, he lets it go.

“It is to your benefit not to become involved,” Thor says instead, slipping into the commanding tone learned at his father’s knee. “This is a matter purely between our realms, and we have no intention of dragging you in amongst it.”

“At this stage, we have no intention of being dragged anywhere.” Dry as dust, Fury turns to Loki. “So just tell me this: are you intending to take the tesseract from us?”

“Its power is tethered here.” For the first time Loki allows his frustration to show, though Thor recognises the smooth ease of pretence beneath it. “The Allfather wished it to remain here, for reasons I do not entirely understand. I was young enough at the time it was moved to have learned something of it before it was removed from the vault, but not enough. He could move it, but he sleeps.”

“I thought this guy was the king.”

“It is more complicated than that,” he says, and his irritation only grows. “And allow me to put it this way: the tesseract might need to remain here, but that alone is no guarantee of protection for your realm and people.”

“Because we don’t know how to use it?”

“Because the Vanir could use the Earth as a distraction via the tesseract.”

Thor turns a sharp look upon Loki, who ignores him entirely as Fury goes onward. “In what manner?”

But Fury’s eye has returned to him. “You said Asgard was bound to the protection of Midgard.”

“Something to that effect,” he begins, slow; when he glances to Loki, his brother gives a barely perceptible rise of one shoulder that says _go on, then_. Returning to his mortal audience, Thor’s brow furrows; general history was never a favoured subject, though tales of battle and glory had always been his favourite. “Some thousand years ago, there was a great war between Midgard and Jötunheimr – or more accurately, wholesale slaughter of Midgardians by the Jötnar.”

“Only the Allfather’s intervention saved your world from eternal winter and subjugation under Laufey-king.”

Loki speaks of his purported father with no trace of irony, or indeed any real emotion at all. Thor finds he does not quite know how to think of this, but Stark’s dubious curiosity overrides anything he might wish to say.

“So Frosty the Snowman came and tried to kill all of us?”

“Many years ago, yes.” And again, he wears arch irony as well as he does his fine clothing, bearing with it the faintest smirk. “Before you ask, I was but an infant at the time.”

“So you don’t remember it,” Fury says, flat; Loki seems to find amusement in the convenience of it.

“I have no particular memory of the time, no.”

“So when was it exactly that the Allfather sent the tesseract here?” Loki does not answer immediately, and Fury’s attention turns to Thor, who immediately gives a light shake of his head, turning to Loki in some confusion.

“Surely you must know, Loki? You always paid far more attention to that sort of thing than I ever did – or ever would.”

Loki’s dry reply is given sudden and considerable charm by dint of the face his eyes sparkle with a fondness Thor does not often get to see him display so openly. “I had noticed,” he muses, something low and amused brewing beneath the simple facts. “Our sixth century, I believe.”

“Oh, that will be why I didn’t notice,” Thor replies, almost glad. “I spent most of that time hunting with Týr, as I remember.”

“I still have that bearskin rug you brought me. Do you know the one I mean, Thor? It’s in my chambers, just before the grand fireplace. The one with the mirrors, yes?”

He is no inexperienced adolescent, but still Thor cannot help the flush that climbs up from his collar. In Loki’s mischievous grin he feels the remembrance of the night when Loki had been Jötunn-blue and desperate to take all of Thor into himself, even as he fought against everything that had become truth borne by a lifetime of lie.

“I’ve seen it recently, yes,” he says, with an equanimity Loki finds admirable even as Stark continues to process the information they give with quick curiosity.

“Wait – you guys are the same age?”

“More or less,” Loki says, clearly bored by the subject; Thor, for his part, wonders how he could possibly have ever forgotten how very clever his brother is. “Thor is older, I am younger. But we were raised together.”

“Which is why you don’t know your parents?”

“It’s one of the reasons, yes.” This time when he rolls his eyes towards the mortal, his irritation is all thin ennui. “Come now, Mr. Stark, let a magician keep some of his mystery.”

“You’re a sorcerer. I was never any good at D&D, sure, but I’m pretty sure there’s a difference.”

“And you’re very kind to notice so.”

Fury interrupts with a swiftness that belies long association with such back and forth. “So you two are implying the Allfather left the tesseract here to protect us.”

“I don’t believe so.” Fury looks set to protest but Loki speaks over him, voice carrying and clear as if he speaks a ballad across the Allfather’s banqueting table. “You are very ignorant of your own place upon the World Tree, and also lack the resources to do much with an object of such power. In that respect, I can only assume the Allfather believed that this would therefore be a suitable place to conceal a quiescent object, even one as powerful as the tesseract.” The mortal’s mouth is working, and Loki is almost kind when he adds: “Although things can and do change.”

“Those wacky Nazis,” Stark mutters into his drink, and then jerks, amber liquid sloshing over his fingers as he glares across the table. “You _kicked_ me!”

Coulson ignores him, dark eyes fixed upon Loki as if he is the only creature in this room. “So you came here because of the tesseract, but you can’t remove it?”

“No.” And he smiles over Coulson’s clear scepticism. “My intention was to quiet it before the Vanir realised it was not in the vault under Glaðsheimr.”

“Before it attracted attention.”

With easy grace Loki turns his attention to the agent’s equally unimpressed superior. “We are bound to your service, Commander Fury. I have explained this to you before.” This time, when he smiles, it is very nearly a blade unsheathed. “Once, we were worshipped as gods for the good we did your people. And we have not forgotten that.”

“Do we have to build altars in your name and sacrifice virgins, or something?” Stark rolls the tumbler he holds in absent fashion, clicking the ice in lazy cycle through the golden liquid they are suspended in. “Because I mean, a ticker tape parade and a montage set to Snow Patrol or Coldplay or something, that’s probably more what you’re going to get out of us these days.” Then he frowns, holds the glass up to the light as if the level ought never have meandered so low. “Well, either that or a tumblr tracked tag. But you don’t want to hear about _those_.”

“It is a responsibility, Anthony Stark,” Thor says, quiet. “As Loki says, you have for a very long time remained in the dark in regards to the other realms about you. In general they have remained content to leave you be; Midgard is not seen as a threat, nor as any great resource.”

“I…think I’m insulted.” Leaning over the table, Stark turns conspiratorial with Coulson. “Hey, did we just get insulted by the king of magical fairyland in the sky?”

“Please, Mr. Stark,” Loki says, plucking the glass from his hand with careless ease, “my tongue has done far worse and you know it.”

“Yeah, but you at least make it funny. Although give me back my—”

“Friends. My b— _Loki_ has already explained to you that attracting such attention is not desirable.” Thor speaks above all, voice resounding from the walls like reflected thunder. “You were delivered from the threat of the Jötnar a thousand years ago because Asgard and the Allfather made it clear that you are under our protectorate. That is one reason why no-one will interfere with you.”

Fury’s eyebrow moves up in dubious arch. “But now we have the tesseract they will?”

“And you’re saying they might attack Earth not just for the tesseract – which presumably they’re not going to be able to move anymore than you can – but to act as a distraction.”

Thor nods towards Coulson; he’s taken a liking to the man’s relentless calm and sensibilities. “Yes.”

Having since snatched back the glass from Loki, Stark slugs back a burning swallow. “So why don’t you do the same to attract _their_ attention and resources?”

Thor’s mouth drops open. Loki merely shrugs. “The Vanir have little care for any save themselves,” he replies, one long finger tracing an inscrutable pattern upon the smoothness of the varnished wood. “And it would do us little good, besides; the tesseract is all you really have to offer us in terms of weapons of war, and you have no more sway over it than we do.”

“So why don’t you wake up daddy and get him to come sort this out?”

Thor’s skin prickles with half-taken insult, but Loki remains calm. “The Odinsleep cannot be disturbed so easily.”

The agent’s fingers move quick over the device he holds in hand, apparently a scribe under his command. “And how long does it last?”

“It is hard to say. This one, too, was long overdue, and the…circumstances under which it arose are complex.”

Stark glares over the lip of his glass at them all. “So what are you guys fighting about anyway?”

“The Vanir are in the midst of a civil war.” Thor looks sideways, but Loki stares ahead with a bland smile upon his features; with quiet unease, he adds: “But before it was declared, they committed grave offense against both my person and Loki himself.”

“Offense?”

Sometimes, Thor can still taste the blood of the unquiet dead upon his lips, taken from Loki’s laughing mouth as they’d pressed against one another. “It is not your concern.”

“It totally is if it means we’re going to be used as a pawn in an intergalactic tiff.”

“I am staying here, Mr. Stark,” Loki says, quite careless. “You need not be so concerned.”

Thor, however, cannot be so calm. “You are? Loki, why? Surely we could summon another—”

“I am the only sorcerer in Asgard capable of performing this task.” Though Loki has interrupted him with smooth ease, there is a ragged edge to his eyes that keeps Thor silent. “Yes, I should have explained it to you earlier, but circumstances did not permit such luxury.” Then he turns to the commander, his tone utterly business. “The key matter with the tesseract is that it is bound here by the Allfather’s will.”

“And you cannot go against that?”

Loki smiles, and there is nothing joyful in it. “I know you are unfamiliar with the concept of absolute monarchy here and now, but it is simple. His edict is law. He is the king.”

“But I thought you said brawn, blond, and brave here was the king while his daddy was out taking a nap.”

The wording makes him wince, though Loki again shows so outward reaction to being essentially disowned as an Odinson, their choice or not. “This is true. Gungnir is his to wield.”

“Gungnir.” Stark examines this thought, gives then a very narrow look. “That’s Daddy’s boom stick?”

“Stark, this is no place for your daddy issues.”

Thor speaks right over Fury. “It is my father’s staff, yes. And to all intents and purposes it belongs to the hand of the one who sits upon the throne. In fact much of the throne’s power resides more in Gungnir than in Hliðskjálf itself; one without the other is only a half of the whole.”

“So can’t you unbind the tesseract?”

“Thor is not a sorcerer,” Loki says, and he’s leaning back in his chair with a peculiar kind of amusement that Thor does not quite like. “And Gungnir is the tool of a seiðmaðr – or a seiðkona, as it were.”

“It suits your hand better than mine,” he replies, quiet; it is a truth he has long known, and almost one he has feared. But Loki is nonchalant, waving his empty fingers in the air in a sinuous rise and fall.

“Ah, but I am not king.”

“So what were you doing with it then?”

“Oh,” Loki says, and his eyes are deceptively wide, “Thor often allows me to handle his favoured shafts.”

“I… _way_ too much information, buddy.”

“Better that than a complete dearth.” And he then tilts his head to Coulson and his endless note-taking, lips quirked high. “As it happens, Thor _can_ wield Gungnir – it responds most truly to the mind of its rightful holder – but many of its deeper mysteries will never be his.”

“Shouldn’t…well, look, I don’t know a sweet goddamn about crown prince academies or whatever, but surely that should have been in the training manual.”

“It is not considered appropriate for a male to engage in seiðr.” Loki’s smile has many more teeth than it ought to, and his eyes are dark above its ragged curve. “Especially not the crown prince of Asgard.”

“Seiðr?”

Loki’s impatience resurfaces. “Think of it as my sorcery, which you’ve seen quite enough of for the moment; its deeper mysteries are not a concept I wish to try and explain to you now, Mr. Stark. We simply haven’t the time enough – or the alcohol, as it were.”

“Yeah, well,” he mutters, and then peers at Loki through his glass. “So hang on –you’re a guy, right?”

“Do you wish to check and see?” A low growl vibrates the air, and Loki turns to his brother with a frown. “Thor, I thought I sent Freki out. Did you summon him back?”

He only just manages to speak in proper syllables rather than rhotic consonants this time. “Freki’s not _here_.”

At first, Loki seems bewildered. A moment later, his laughter is short, but surprisingly light. “Then stop that.” Returning his attention to the so-named consultant, he grins in a way that promises blood at some later date. “Put it this way, Mr. Stark – it is but one of many ways I am largely regarded as inappropriate in polite Asgardian society.”

“God of Mischief and Lies?”

“Precisely.” His hand moves as if to toast him with an invisible drink, though there’s more irritation than camaraderie in it. “But I can see your question, so allow me to answer it and save us the time – the Allfather is a mighty seiðmaðr. He needed to be in order to raise Asgard to this pinnacle of divine evolution, firmly anchoring us all in the golden age in which we now live eternal.” His lips curved, a frown rich with memory not his own. “But we often do things to make worlds for our descendants that we would not wish the children do themselves.”

Only Thor knows the significance of why Loki’s hand moves down, restless upon the top of one thigh; Stark frowning again, and has taken his own peculiar device of light and movement from one pocket. “So, what – the Godfather made paradise, and now wants to leave it the way it is _forever_?”

“I am not sure how well any of you understand the concept of Ragnarök, but it is not an ending, nor even a beginning, precisely.” Loki’s eyes glitter strangely, reflecting light that can be nothing but false for Thor can see no source. “It is the turn of all things. Nothing begins and nothing stops, because it is one big revolution.”

“You are on the cusp of Ragnarök?”

“I cannot be sure, but I believe so.” Though he speaks with preternatural calm, when Thor moves his own hand beneath the table to lay it over Loki’s upon his thigh, he can feel the faint tremor that nevertheless seems bone-deep. “It is the responsibility and concern of the gods, Commander. You must trust us to know how best to act.”

“Yeah, sure, I can understand that – but am I really the only one forgetting the _mischief and lies_ part?”

At that, Loki laughs again; he sounds very nearly fond even as he adds the faintest hint of pity to it, too. “One must find some way of passing the time, Mr. Stark.”

A knock startles out across the room; a moment later another agent, bearing glasses and dressed in a sharp suit, slips soundless through the room and leans down to Coulson’s seated level. “Excuse me, Agent Coulson?”

He doesn’t look up from the rapid looping path his stylus takes before him. “Yes, Sitwell?”

“Dr. Foster requires a word with Mr. Laufeyson.”

Thor jerks, the name a bitter taste in his mouth for all he had not spoken it aloud. But Loki remains serene, and in fact gives a little shrug more in the movement of his mouth than shoulders. “Inform her I shall be there shortly.”

“I understand it’s urgent.” He moves back to the door, disappears through it; a scarce second later a woman, clearly hesitant, is almost propelled in. Immediately she looks back with a flash of desperation in the curve of her turned-away face.

“I didn’t actually want to come _in_.” The agent jut gives her an impassive look, steps back, and is gone; with the door closed between her and escape, she can do little more than just stand before the table with no words and a paper notebook twisted between her working hands. Coulson shakes his head, waves a hand towards Loki.

“It’s fine, Dr. Foster. Sit down.”

Being more than accustomed to the tall and svelte women of Asgard, the doctor seems startlingly small to Thor’s eyes. But despite her clear unease, there’s a strength to the way she holds herself as she steps quickly forward. Thor finds he cannot help but smile. As if sensing it she looks up, and for a moment she is a deer in headlights.

Then, she smiles back. It’s surprisingly open, one hand pushing dark hair back behind her ear as she takes her uncertain place where Freki had been.

“Um…hello.”

“Hello.” For some reason he cannot help but beam wider, filled with sudden warmth. “You are a companion of my…of Loki’s?”

“This is Jane Foster.” Loki’s voice is by turn cool water, shivering down his spine like baptismal promise. “She aids me in the work I do for the mortals.”

“I _really_ wish he wouldn’t keep calling us that. Makes us sound like pets, or something.”

Loki’s head swings around with almost preternatural speed, his smile unblinking as he turns it upon a now-wincing Stark. “But you were the one who spoke of it being the day to bring one’s pets to work.”

“I do not even _want_ to know what constitutes a suitable leash in your book,” he says, hands up in quick surrender; then he’s turning to the woman, chin balanced on the palm of one hand. “Hey, Jane, no offense, but you came for a reason, yeah? Not that I mind the distraction, but Fury’s got that one eye of his on me all the time and I’m starting to feel threatened.” When Fury snorts, again he treats them all to a look that’s pure boyish innocence. “What? Pepper says it’s good for me to talk about my feelings.”

“I…the tesseract is being difficult. I’ve tried to calm it, but it doesn’t seem to want to respond to me, or to Erik.” Flipping through the book, fumbling just a little, she then holds it out to Loki. “I’ve brought the algorithms I’ve been adjusting, just to see if you can see what’s wrong with them.” Then she chances a glance sideways, lips pressing together when she sees how Fury watches them all blankly. “We can go outside, really. I’m sure it won’t be a second.”

Thor must agree with the scientist; only rarely has he seen his brother stumped over some mysterious problem of seiðr or logic. But Loki snaps out a hand, holds her still, without once looking up from the scratched ink upon the notebook she had slid towards him. “Wait.”

“Can you see the problem?”

“No.” His lips purse, and one nails scrapes across the page, trailing ink in its wake; it rearranges itself upon the page like misshapen pieces of an incomplete puzzle, and his frown turns most dire. “It should respond, given you have factored…” He looks up, narrows his eyes at Fury, who just raises the eyebrow not under the patch. “If you’ll excuse me, I should go attend to this.”

“We’re in the middle of a meeting here.”

“And you’ll be in the middle of an apocalypse if I remain.” Raising ink-stained fingers from the page, he flicks his hand and they are white again, like blue-veined snow. “But if you would prefer that, I can stay. It is not a particular concern of mine – after all, _I_ have a home to return to.”

And Fury rolls his one eye. “All right, fine. Go stop the end of the world. Again.”

“I suppose expecting a thank you is too much to ask,” Loki observes to no-one in particular as he moves elegantly to his feet; Thor feels the tug to join him even as Loki places a warning hand on his shoulder. Stark just snorts.

“Hey, I’ve been at this gig for _how_ long now? And I haven’t even got the damn t-shirt yet.”

Loki mutters something just under his breath that no-one catches, though he seems amused with himself when he leans close to Thor’s ear and whispers: “I will be back shortly.”

And how he wants to reach out, to catch his fingers, to press them to his lips. Loki has been returned to his side for such a short time that separation aches even before the cut is made. But he merely nods. “I will wait for you.”

“See that you always do.”

Loki then moves out of the room without a single glance backward. The scientist reaches for her book just as Thor pushes it towards her; their hands meet in the middle, and she starts. Then, she gives a little bob of her head, a half-breathed giggle. “Thank you!” Then she is gone, the door snapping closed in her wake. Thor watches it for good moment, but only until Stark lobs a balled up piece of paper at his head. He swings around, only to find the man giving him an innocent _what you gonna do?_ shrug; a moment later he adds:

“You know, Jane’s a looker and all, but it’s probably not in good form to check her out in front of the guy you’re bonking. Especially given the whole _unhinged trickster_ thing.”

Thor takes up the balled up paper, rolls it between his fingers like his has the thought to crush it to dust. “You are saying Loki is mad?”

“I’m saying you probably shouldn’t _make_ him mad,” he says, blithe enough as he turns his attention from Thor’s simmering temper to the device before him. “Huh, I only caught some of that, but…I’m wondering if I should go down there.”

“You stay where you are.”

Fury’s flat words actually surprise him; he looks up, eyes wide. And then he goes back to his tapping. “Yes, _Dad_. Do you want me to go out back and rake the leaves when we’re done here, too?”

Ignoring Stark entirely now, Fury turns his attention purely upon Thor. “So, there’s one thing Mr. Laufeyson never quite gave us – you’re king of another realm, right. We get that. What are we supposed to call you?”

“My name is adequate.” He barely skips the beat before he adds flatly: “And you wish to speak with me of Loki now that he is gone.”

“Ten points to the blond with the oversized hardware.” And as Stark’s device begins to beep alarmingly at him, he scowls deeper. “You know, he always said that you weren’t the quickest.”

“He did what?”

“But then he’s a hell of a liar.” Stark flicks the thing closed, tosses it aside. His dark eyes are deep holes that brook no argument whatsoever when he speaks now. “You’ve known each other your whole lives, right?”

The glib nature of almost everything he says betrays the iron of the will beneath, Thor can see now; he is almost wary when he gives an answer he still imbues with the absolute truth. “Yes.”

“Has he ever betrayed you?”

“No.”

But it is clear Stark doesn’t believe it, even as he kicks back in his chair again; the relaxed stance remains at odds with the eyes of the warrior he has unblinkered. “Because the Loki in the myths, he seemed more about the lulz than the loyalty, if that makes any sense. Which is probably doesn’t, sure, I understand; Midgardian slang, you’re not a local, can’t expect everything.”

Thor blinks once, slow and strong. “If you’re quite finished talking to yourself?”

“Only way to be assured of an intelligent conversation,” he says, and drops his chair forward with a bang. “You didn’t know he was coming here.”

“I did not, no.” He does not like to feel as if he stands at the centre of an interrogation; he is leaning forward over the table, fingers slowing moving into fists. “But I am not Loki’s keeper, and he is a force unto himself.”

“But you are his king.”

“While the Allfather sleeps.”

“Yeah, no offense, but I still think this sounds like a really lousy time to take a nap.”

For a moment Thor does not speak, marshalling his thoughts; though he has no great desire to mislead the mortals, the truth remains that Loki is dancing a delicate line here. For not the first time, he is amazed to think Loki trusted him enough to leave him alone; king or not, this is Loki’s gameboard and he is put a passing wildcard. “Not necessarily. The Odinforce which he replenishes by way of his sleep is both what sustains his own immortality, and then Asgard itself.” Then he leans back, crosses his arms, and resumes a face that brooks no dissent. “I cannot explain it to you in any great detail – it is something more suited to Loki’s care than my own – but it is both drawn from and given over to Yggdrasil.”

“The World Tree, yeah?”

“Yes.” Thor has only vague memories of the tree herself; it takes great strength of will and energy to walk her branches. He has never been much further than those which hold Asgard aloft, and certainly never as far down as Urðr’s well: but he can remember the rough bark beneath his childish fingers, the thrum of life within her thick leaves, the sound of the universe rustling through the spread branches and the creak of the limbs that bent but never broke beneath the weight of worlds.

 _She is everything, Thor – and you are hers. She is never yours, for she is all of us._ And Odin’s eye had moved to Loki, standing in utter stillness with head cast so far back it was a miracle he had not overbalanced. _Your brother, too. He belongs to Yggdrasil…we are all bound together, no matter what fate befalls each one of us._

The memory hurts, gives his word sharp edges he knows not how to blunt. “The realms have great need of the Allfather in these dark times, and so he girds himself for battle while we do what we must to protect it in his steed,” he says, brittle now; Stark still seems intent on arguing.

“So you’re just waiting for dad to get home and throw out the gatecrashers?”

That stings deep, right in the place where his honour and duty have always held together his courage and purpose. “It is my place to protect the realms as their future king.”

“So you’re not actually king yet?”

Though he knows calling Mjölnir to hand would be the swiftest way to escalate this argument into something more than petty sniping, it takes a great deal of self-control and the knowledge that Loki will lash him to within an inch of his sanity with his silvered tongue to not do it. “I believe that this situation is somewhat beyond your comprehension, Anthony Stark.”

“Tony. If you’re going to insult my intelligence, at least call me _Tony_.” And he reaches for his glass again, his own temper seeming to has cooled as quickly as it had heated. “Look, I know you’re an alien and I’m just some rich-ass genius who discovered and isolated a ne chemical element in his basement and saved the whole damn world by doing so, but taking a _nap_? Just seems to be a really weird way of protecting every realm in the known universe, you know?”

This encroaches upon territory Thor knows not if he should tread. With a sigh, he steps up, prays the uneven terrain will bear his weight. “The Allfather sees further in his sleep.”

“What?” And he peers into his glass, then back at Thor. “Yeah, I know we’ve had magic and monsters and Micky Mouse operations, but now it’s _really_ getting weird.”

“He can see much through the eyes of Heimdall, the ravens, and Hliðskjálf,” Thor elaborates, stiff. “But it is only in the Odinsleep that he might walk as dreamers do.”

“I…thought you didn’t understand this.”

Thor cannot help the edge of temper. “One day I will walk in the place of my father.” And Mjölnir hums at his hip, even as he purposely keeps his hands flat upon the table. Keeping his eyes upon them, he adds quietly: “Both in these realms, and those beyond. I understand my duty, and I know what it is that is asked of me.”

Yet to Thor’s mind, both then and now, Loki has always seemed the one much more suited to such matters upon the throne. Childhood confessions, given beneath shared bedclothes and whispered into the darkness, had said as much. _You are the seiðmaðr; can you not do that for me?_ And Loki’s eyes had been unblinking dark pools in the moons-bright shadows between them.

 _If you are king then you will do what you must, brother. It is the way of the worlds, and you must work your weave as the Norns have patterned for you and you alone_.

“Are you going somewhere with this, Stark?” Fury asks, finally; Coulson still takes his notes, silent and ever-efficient, and Stark swivels to him.

“What, so you’re saying you trust both Loki and Thor with no reservations, exchanges, or refunds?” He looks to be on the verge of laughing or just walking out. “No offense, Fury, but in my experience you wouldn’t trust a kid not to eat all their vegetables with dessert right next to them.”

Thor shakes his head before a true argument can begin. “I understand that our presence here is both surprising and distressing,” he offers with carefully constructed constancy, “but you have my word that I have no intention of allowing any harm to befall your realm.”

“Ah, but the myths aren’t exactly glowing reviews as to your typical behaviour there, giant killer and mead drinker extraordinaire.”

“I wouldn’t start in on the complaints about actions undertaken while drunk, Stark,” Fury observes with a snort. “At least I’ve never found _him_ hungover in a roadside donut.”

“Nice, Fury. You’ve really hurt my feelings today. Remind me to take you off my Christmas card list.” He takes another hit of his drink, rolls his eyes. “But look, Thor’s all about protecting stuff, never mind if he gets to do it by beating shit up. Stress relief and a big hammer, I can understand all that. What I’m saying is: what is Loki actually _doing_?”

“What he must.”

“Which is?” No-one bites, and his exasperation grows. “Come on, I know you’re not all geniuses like me, but you _must_ see it.”

Fury’s invitation drips verbal acid, slow and heavy. “Enlighten us.”

“Xanatos speed chess, yeah?” When this grand pronouncement is met with a scattered series of blank looks, Stark looks inclined to want to let his head fall to the desk. Instead he opens his arms, tries again. “Come on, think about it – I’m the one with the dead sexy voice and beard, I’ve got a hot redhead on my arm and a kick-ass tower in the middle of New York City, then there’s the billion dollars in my accounts and the bright red suit of armour I fly around in. Also, I drip verbal acid and turn every potential defeat to my own victory. If anyone should be playing Xanatos speed chess here, it’s _me_.”

Fury’s inability to look unimpressed is so complete it might nearly be inborn. “Do you ever actually _expect_ me to understand what the hell you’re on about, Stark? Or can I just tune your shit out right now?”

Stark all but throws his hands into the air. “Can’t you see? He’s playing a _game_.”

This Thor cannot argue, though instinct seeks to defend his brother’s honour. “And you wish to know what game it is,” he says, blank; this earns him a dark look.

“Do _you_ even know?”

“Loki does not seek to do you any harm.”

“So you’re trusting him to stay here with us and keep us out of harm’s way while you go back and kick the arses of these Vanir folk until your father wakes up and smites them with his pillow or whatever?” Stark’s upending the bottle again, slivers of ice angrily swirling beneath fresh onslaught. “Because no offense, not only does it sound like you want him to go with you, but it sounds like Loki’s way too interested in the tesseract.”

“And what do you know about the tesseract, Thor?”

He blinks, startled at Coulson’s quiet query. “I…very little. I had other interests, when it came to that which was in our father’s weapons vault.” Concealing any residual embarrassment with cool majesty, he raises his chin, looks down his long nose at them all. “And I have explained, I am no seiðmaðr.”

“But you do not deny _Loki_ is a great sorcerer,” Fury shoots back. “Does he want it for himself?”

All Thor sees in his mind’s eye is Loki left to this, to the constant trials and suspicions of this place; with it he sees also the swell of his abdomen growing every day while Thor remains elsewhere, fighting the battles of a child yet even to take his first breath. “Not for himself, no.”

“Then for who?” he persists. “Because while you say that you will protect us, Stark has a point: Loki hasn’t got the reputation around here for being anything approaching trustworthy or selfless.”

“Your stories are inaccurate.”

“But they had to come from _somewhere_.”

Though he does not stand, looming over them all as he wishes, Thor cannot stop his hands from slamming down upon the table; only Coulson does not flinch. “If you do not wish for us to remain, I will gladly take Loki home with me,” he says, low, attention fixed upon the leader of these mortals. “If you do not wish for our protection, I will not _gladly_ remove it. But remove it I will, with the warning that our resources will only stretch so far and it is the lives of your people you are risking by not heeding Loki’s counsel. I was raised to such responsibility by way of birth, Commander Fury. From what I understand you were raised to it by the belief and trust of your people. Do you wish to betray their trust and deny the hand extended to you in the spirit of brothers and warriors in arms?”

“This isn’t exactly a take me to your leader moment, you realise?” Stark mutters, and Thor grits his teeth.

“Do you wish our aid or no?” Thor’s edge is blunt, but bright with the promise of a whetstone concealed in the other hand. “For you will receive it one way or another, given that I am not fool nor cruel enough to leave you to the untender mercies of the Vanir queen should she choose to turn her attentions to the tesseract and those who hold it in such untrained hands, but it can be easy. Or it could be hard, for us both.”

Fury is not a man who appreciates ultimatums, Thor can see. But he is also a man who knows how to look to his own. “Let him stay, then,” he says, clipped and cold. “But it is _your_ word I want, not his.”

Thor’s own voice is hard. “As to what?”

“That you will not involve us in this matter – and that you will not remove the tesseract from us.”

“The tesseract is not mine to command,” he says, careful and clear; he has not Loki’s talent for dissemination, but he prays this will be enough. “It is a matter you will have to take up with the Allfather.” Thor is unable now to think of Loki at all for fear of giving something away. “But you have my word I will not do anything to harm Midgard or those she cradles to her breast.”

From the arch look the man gives him, he’s all too familiar with words that say less than they mean. “Not exactly what I was asking, but then I suppose we have to work with what we have.” Tapping a finger against his chin, he adds flatly: “Are you returning to Asgard now?”

“I will be very shortly.”

“Gods help us, then.” Rich irony dogs both his words and his heels as he stands, and takes his leave without another word. That prickles at Thor’s dignity – though he has been king for but a short time, he has been prince since birth. Midgard, however, seems to have moved beyond such modes of government.

“Is there anything you need from us before you return?”

Thor returns his attention to the agent, shakes his head. “I should speak with Loki before I do anything more.”

“I see.” The man moves close to the still-seated Stark, leans close to convey something in low voice. It earns him an odd look from the mortal, but he is already taking his folders and peculiar tablet and removing by another door. Then with a sigh, Stark rises, gives Thor an odd look.

“Apparently Loki’s down in one of the training halls with Barton. And apparently I get to be your baby-sitter and take you down there.”

“He is with the archer.”

At the flat tone, Stark pulls a face that seems somewhere between deeply amused and wary. “Not a fan of Katniss, then?”

“I just wish to know more of the company Loki chooses to keep.”

Stark snorts, runs a hand back through his hair so that it stands near on end. “Considering Barton’s pretty much the real lone wolf of the group, I think that tells you something about Loki’s choice in friends.” Casting a quick look about, he adds with feigned casualness: “Speaking of wolves, how much would I have to give him for Freki?”

“Freki is one of two wolves of the Allfather.”

He blinks. “So he can have the other one.”

“Geri is generally in my company while the Allfather sleeps.”

“Can’t you share?” Stark is one of the very few people Thor has known to remain undisturbed by his expression when he chooses to stare at them in a manner that echoes his father’s best regal stare. In fact, Stark seems to be growing almost bored. “You guys seem to share a lot of stuff as it is,” he says now, and Thor frowns.

“We did learn to share as we grew up, yes. But believe me, Loki was never very good at it.”

“I believe you. You should see how much of my stuff he’s already “borrowed” without intent to return.” Now he near sulks. “That’s _stealing_ , by the way.”

“I’m his king and not his keeper, Man of Iron.”

“And they say _he’s_ the silvertongued one.”

Having no wish to continue in this vein, Thor moves on. “So he resolved his issue with the tesseract?”

“From what Coulson said, sure.” The look he gives him wavers between conspiratorial and pitying. “What, you wanted to see that hot little scientist again?”

He objects to such objectification, but he cannot deny she intrigues him, somehow. “She seems a fair companion for my—for Loki.”

The quiet little side-eye this earns him from Stark could mean he’s picked up on any number of things; Thor curses his inability to twist words with Loki’s ease even as Stark nods approvingly. “Oh, so now you’re setting him up with her? I don’t even want to know how things got started between you two, if this is how you play it when you are together.”

The memories of Vanaheimr never lurk far away from his conscious mind, but Stark’s words bring it back full force: the silver-strung song of thunder and shadow, tinged with frost and lightning. And Thor closes his eyes. It is never hard to remember how it had been: to hold Loki beneath him, against him, to be both inside his brother and surrounded by him, his seiðr and Thor’s elemental divinity winding about one another so easily it might have been they had never been anything but the same weave separated—

He opens his eyes. “I do not believe you can start something that always existed.”

Three fingers rub at the bearded chin, then press hard against his lips. “I’ve never been a religious man, you know,” Stark muses, and then drops his hand with a sigh. “And I think this is _why_. I’m getting a headache already. But tell me – is one of Loki’s kids really wrapped around the world? Because I’ve got a bit of property out in Los Angeles I’d appreciate him not devaluing with further earthquakes, can you get him to pass that on?”

Thor only stares. “Where is Loki?”

“Yeah, probably we should go and find him, I guess.” Stark raises an eyebrow, snags the bottle before making for the door. “At least he has a sense of humour.”

“Does this situation amuse you?”

“It fascinates me.” But for all the lightness of the correction, Thor can see deeper than Stark’s easygoing exterior suggests; for all his glib tongue, there’s something about the man that goes deeper. “But then Pepper’s not the only one to tell me I don’t react like a normal person. She just says it loudest.”

“Who is this _Pepper_? I assume you do not speak of the condiment.”

“She’s the main course and the dessert.” A moment later, Stark winces. “That sounded better in my head. Please don’t tell her I said that.” Quickening his step, as if to leave the words behind, he calls back: “They’re through here.”

Stark has brought him to a great hall, mostly empty save for the curious equipment and more familiar stands that line the walls. It reminds him immediately of the sparring halls of Asgard and he knows it to be no mistake when he observes the two figures at its deepest centre.

Both stand sleek and strong, moving in easy circling pace around one another. To his trained eye it’s clear the bout has been going on for some time, given the measure they have taken of one another. But neither appears to be tiring, and neither shows any sign of backing down. Their hands are empty of weapons, save for what they bring in both mind and body – and spirit.

“We should be selling tickets to this.”

“Be quiet.” Thor can feel his incredulous eyes – and does not doubt for a moment Anthony Stark is not often commanded such – but his attention is focused upon the warriors. The mortal has an immediate disadvantage, but Sif’s posture and attention speak of respect and wary curiosity; he knows that she would not bother with the mortal unless she thought they both had something to gain from such an engagement.

A leap, and a twist, and the game has begun. It’s truly more a dance, of sorts. Thor’s own restless muscles cause him to move uneasy, desire welling; this is a song he knows well, one he wishes to join in both voice and motion. But this is not for him. Instead it is two warriors of different realms making their introductions, seeking alliance in the push and pull of combat. It’s fast and hard, and very nearly silent; they do not speak, save in breath caught and expelled shout. Sif is disinclined to battle in close quarters without a weapon to hand, but she understands the leverage of bodies and the pivot of her own; given many if not most of her opponents are greater in mass than she herself, it is a lesson she learned young, and hard.

The mortal knows the same, and for all she is but mortal she is very quick and has assimilated a very nearly alarming amount about Sif’s differences. They grasp, grapple; when they arc sideways, the woman takes off halfway up the wall before spinning back with a vicious kick. Sif blocks, brings her down; the agent in turn uses the gifted momentum to bring Sif around with her, finding her feet.

“Yup. Definitely tickets. And possibly action figures. Those’ll sell like hotcakes, I’m telling you…especially if we toss in some Iron Man merch as well, you know? That’s it, I’m getting Pep on this.”

But it does not last much longer. The fight is both energetic and energising; Thor is all but rolling on the balls of his feet when the redheaded woman concedes. Pushing a gloved hand back through disarrayed hair, she nods with cool reserve. Sif returns it, acknowledgment of a noble battle well fought: valiant and violent, brilliant and bright. They clasp hands at Sif’s lead, then step back with low nods.

“Well.” Stark rolls the bottle he’d liberated from the meeting room between his hands, eyes wide. “I am officially never sleeping in the same building as that woman ever again.”

Sharp ears catch his words; the agent’s sly smile says as much when she looks over, and then returns her attention to Sif. The Asgardian warrior bows her head one last time, and then makes her way towards Thor.

“My king.” With hand over heart, she gives him a low bow. “How went your council?”

“We will be returning to Asgard, and to our task upon Vanaheimr.” He must pause a moment before he can add with composure he does not strictly feel: “Loki will remain as advisor and lord protector in my name.”

“Huh.” Thor turns, finds Stark examining the mostly empty bottle. “Do we not get a vote on his official title? Because honestly, we probably should. Although he’s not going to be a consultant. _I’m_ the consultant.”

The agent takes the bottle from his hand, and it says something for the display they have just witnessed that he does not reach for it back. “You are a very special snowflake, Stark, we know.” Already she’s turned back to Sif. “It’s a pity you have to leave, I think there’s a lot I could learn from you.”

“And I from you. We haven’t had a chance to spar with weapons.” Longing colours Sif’s words with a vulnerability Thor has not often heard from her, but then it hardens again in the cool mask he knows almost better than her true face. “Yet we have our duties. Perhaps when this is over, Agent Romanov, we might return to further the links between our realms.”

Though there is no inherent question in the words themselves, Thor can see it in her unwavering gaze when she turns it upon him. Yet he cannot be certain of any answer he might give her. Midgard has offered up to them those who might be allies, and he cannot deny their fascination. Without any true idea as to what Loki makes of it he finds the decision impossible make alone, and a moment later that is all he has to offer her. “Where is Loki?”

“Oh, up there.”

Stark’s nonchalant wave directs his attention to the criss-cross of metal overhead that makes up the supporting beams of the ceiling overhead. His quick gaze picks them out within moments: Barton and Loki sit up on the gantry, half-wrought in shadow and the illusion of silence. Yet their heads are bent close enough for conversation, a comfortable curve to their bodies that settles low in his gut. Thor has never really seen Loki so at ease in the company of anyone not himself.

Stark follows his gaze upward. “The Hawk’s in his nest, all’s right with the world.” He speaks with an arch irony that goes right past him, but then Thor is getting the impression that this is the status quo for anyone within earshot of Anthony Stark. “Suppose you’ll _have_ to come visiting, seeing how they’re nest-buddies now and everything.”

And that is what settles low enough to spark his temper. “Loki!” His voice resounds about the great hall with a rolling volume that has Romanov’s eyes widening, and Stark’s half-narrowing to match his wince. “I would speak with you!”

For a moment Thor almost believes that Loki will not come down. Even at this distance, there’s something clear in his eyes that speaks of displeasure. A moment later, with only the scarcest sort of flash and ceremony, Loki’s sorcery moves him from the height to his side. “There is no need to shout, Thor.” Though the tone is mild enough, Thor can see the blossom of frost threatened in his steady gaze. “I knew you were here.”

“As I knew you.”

“You should be careful with the things you know.” Before Thor can even imagine any sort of response to this, Loki turns a strikingly honest smile upon the combatants. “It was well-fought, Sif, Agent Romanov.”

Sif’s nod is answer enough, both for Loki and Sif herself, but Romanov dips her head in acknowledgement while never once looking away. “Thank you.” Then her pale eyes narrow, contemplative and quick in the fashion of a prowling feline.  “I don’t suppose you want to go a round?”

Loki’s shoulders move in smooth nonchalance even as Thor feels his own tighten. “If you wish it.”

“Oh. Shit.” Stark tilts his head. “Can I have your stuff when you die, Nat?”

“Only if I can shove it somewhere up your person first.” Turning back to Loki, she says: “Shall we go?”

Their battle moves in different patterns to that of Sif and Romanov; it is graceful in a way Sif’s ferocity would not allow for, even though both seem to be wild animals only just holding their deeper instincts in check. Stark has abandoned his bottle, and is holding up another of his odd devices while another seems to make record of what occurs before them.

“For some reason, I’m always surprised to see how he can fight,” he mutters, and surprised, Thor feels his hand instinctively reach towards Mjölnir.

“He did not do battle himself when the tesseract was threatened?”

“Yeah, sure – with magic and smart-ass words. Not I can’t say anything about that, some people might say I do the same thing. Although, you know, people are assholes.” Still working absently upon his cryptic symbols, he adds: “But this…this.”

“Your Agent Romanov is a hearty fighter, and very quick.” And she holds her own well against Loki’s strengths of long limbs and swift centripedal force. “But this is not even scratching the surface of his skill.”

“You’re saying he’s going easy on her?” Stark blinks, then snickers. “Don’t tell her you said that, or you’ll be picking knives out of your back until you fly away home.”

“I’m saying she could not seek to defeat him through brute force alone,” he replies immediately, wishing to bring no dishonour upon her admirable skill. “But then I do not think that is the lady’s way.”

And Stark is laughing, quiet and to himself. “Oh, Fabio, believe me – you have _no_ idea.”

When the match ends in something of a deadlock that Thor knows Loki had forced, they return to their side for but a moment before Stark’s pointing again.

“I vote for these two next,” he says, and even his tiny machine-thrall beeps in apparent agreement. “Come on, two gods, going at it like kids in the schoolyard at recess – you don’t get _that_ every day. Go for it.”

Indecision holds Thor still. While it may be one thing to imagine Loki fighting with seiðr, or to observe him sparring against a mortal who simply did not have the same inherent strength or durability of an Æsir warrior, this is something else. It is something more, to spar against a warrior of his people in such condition—

A pale hand stretches towards him, fingers lightly crooked in open invitation. “Come, my king,” he murmurs, and the hard light in his eyes is no request. “Think of it as forging congenial relations between our realms.”

“Hey – we said _sparring_ , right?”

The smile Loki turns about him is all brilliant teeth. “Did you not get enough footage from the last time? Because I am quite willing to give you more, should it be needful to maintain diplomatic channels between our peoples.”

“How is it that no-one’s ever sewn your mouth shut, again?”

Not quite willing to be drawn into the back and forth bickering of Stark and Loki, Thor sheds most of the heavier plate of his armour until he is left in light trousers and undershirt. Having discarded his boots to one side he straightens to find Loki much as he was in the Midgardian shirt and slacks, his own feet bare. As they take their opposing place upon the unfamiliar field, he remains upright while Thor lowers his centre of gravity just slightly, edging closer.

“No weapons?”

“No seiðr,” Thor retorts, and Loki rolls his eyes.

“Then no tricks from Mjölnir either.”

He bristles; the hammer remains with his armour, untouched and uncalled. “You question my honour in battle?” he asks, and shifts his weight forward. “Come, then, and let me teach you something of true honour, trickster.”

“With all due pleasure.”

But of course it is but mere feint. Thor in turn moves forward, back, then forward again. Loki twists to one side but Thor anticipates it, casting most weight back on his backward foot, chasing the angle that will give him most power over the other body. Loki still slips just out of his grip and he cannot help the laugh that escapes him. This is how it has always been between them.

Loki has not his brute strength, but his speed and agility have always made him an intriguing and infuriating partner upon the mats. By nature he’s stubborn, too – but then they had always assumed it simply ran in the family, seeing as they all display it in some shape or form.

 _Loki is not of our blood_.

But such truths do not matter; they are as impotent as lies when all that remains between them is the unmistakable actualities of their bodies and their limits. Thor’s blood rises, singing, matching the thrumming base of dripping sweat and aching muscle. It has weighed upon him, knowing that his forces hold their place still in Vanaheimr while he had to return. His place is amongst the warriors, protecting the realms. Much as he has missed his brother, Thor knows his responsibilities are not only to him, or even himself. He was conceived of, born to, raised upon the knowledge that his life has always been forfeit to the crown that he will one day wear unto his own death.

And there is a reminder of that truth in every hold, every grab, every twist of their bodies in this battle. Loki seeks to trap him, to hold him; a moment later Thor is thrown to the ground by way of Loki’s spiralling leverage, winded and stunned. Immediately Loki straddles his hips, hands slamming down harsh over his wrists.

“Distracted, are we?” Though conversational in his victory, Thor can feel wariness there; Loki is well aware that he cannot hope to hold Thor down long. “In such matters, you should be focused only upon your opponent.” But then it is perhaps not brute strength he places his trust in; a sharp bolt of lust moves from head to heart as Loki arches himself downwards, words like shivering whispers upon his skin. “Oh, brother: _you should think only of me_.”

It’s the desire that does it, Thor thinks – the desire to have his brother pressed beneath him, his body yielding and open even as his clever fingers and quick tongue play at protest. He surges up, flips them over, pins Loki against the mats that line the floor of this training hall. But the smirk Loki wears, the upward tilt of his chin as Thor reaches to restrain him suggests he has allowed this as much as he has invited it. Still Thor stretches Loki’s hands out over his head just far enough to hurt, his thumb and fingers braced against the floor with the space between pressed down hard upon his wrist. Leaning close, he smiles.

“I always think of you.”

The tip of his tongue appears, works a lazy curve over his damp upper lip. “And what of the worlds?” he asks. “In the end, if you had to…which would you choose?”

The sudden edge to his words gives Thor pause; it is all the advantage Loki needs to roll them again. But his brother does not rise, not this time. Instead Loki stretches out over him, like the sky over the soil, and he all in between, burning blazing brilliant life.

“Uh – can we keep this at least PG, guys?”

The taste of his tongue over lips is fresh-fallen snow shot through with silver. Then he straightens, hips pressed hard against Thor’s as he casts a look back to Stark. “I do what I want,” he offers with bland boredom, and Stark rolls his eyes to the ceiling.

“Somebody get the hose.”

“Will this do?”

There’s a whistle of air that sets Thor’s teeth on edge – but even before he can think to roll, to bring Loki down, his brother’s hand has closed about a hard shaft, the fletched feathers shuddering at its end. Thor’s entire body tightens with sudden fury, but Loki smiles as he braces one hand, flows to his feet and glances upward. Barton is already shimmying down; a moment later he strides over to them with a nonchalance that seems near-obscene considering what he has just done.

“Nice trick,” Loki says, tossing him the arrow; Barton snatches it from the air, turns only when Thor’s low voice cuts through the air like a loosed blade.

“How did you know that wouldn’t hit him?”

Stark’s unscrewing the lid of his bottle. “Huh. Didn’t we ever tell you the story about how Barton met Loki?”

And Thor’s roiling anger only rises further “You tried to _shoot_ him?”

Barton’s eyes are unblinking as he returns the arrow to its quiver. “He wasn’t making any particular effort to identify himself as a friendly.”

When Thor turns his attention to Loki, his brother is no more helpful. “You know how I like to make a first impression,” he says with careless ease, and Thor feels his fingers curve into fists. He remembers all too well how Loki had been, in that damned chamber beneath the mountain in Vanaheimr. His brother had been suffering and Thor unable to protect him from those who would wish him harm.

“I do,” he admits, but then he turns back to the mortal with a solemnity matched by the man’s own grave expression. “Might I have a word with you, Agent Barton?”

“Thor, this is unnecessary.”

Loki has cultivated an artful sort of boredom to his words that Thor knows well; he also knows that if Loki truly did not wish him to speak with Barton, he would be actively encouraging him to do so. “I am merely curious about your friends.”

The half-smile he wears is the kind of thing that can cause a challenger to back down from a flyting before Loki even chooses to begin. “Take him for a walk, then. I am sure Agent Romanov, Sif, Mr. Stark and I will find some way to amuse ourselves.”

Stark winces so deeply the gesture is almost audible. “This is going to hurt, isn’t it,” he mutters, eyes flicking between Romanov and Sif as is trying to calculate which death would be the quickest. Then he raises an eyebrow to Thor. “And please tell me _take him for a walk_ isn’t Asgardian slang for some sort of double-tap execution out in the hall.” Jerking a thumb towards Barton, he adds: “Nikita here might take issue with it. He’s kind of her favourite big bird, as I understand these things.”

“I ask merely a conversation,” Thor begins, but Barton is already turning towards one of the doors on the far side of the hall, his step even and near-silent. “We can talk,” he says, and his sharp eyes flick back to the other agent. “Don’t break any bones, Nat.”

“I can leave him in one piece, sure.”

After casting a wary glance between both, Stark raises his hands in surrender. “I _really_ wish I knew which one of us you guys were talking about.”

Thor leaves them to their game as the man leads them from the hall; their destination turns out to be another of those non-descript and charmless rooms tucked about this warren like forgotten knotholes in a tree that might never have actually been alive. For not the first time Thor begins to wonder how Loki has lingered here for so long; he knows how stubborn and single-minded his brother can be once set upon a chosen course, but he also clings tight to a deep aesthetic appreciation that could only be smothered by these oppressive surrounds.

The archer sprawls across from him, but Thor is warrior-born; he knows the watchful stance of his own kind. The man might be only mortal, but he intends to put up a fight should it become necessary. And Thor realises that for all he’s called this conclave, he himself does not even know if it will be.

“I’m assuming this is about Loki,” he begins, watchful if not entirely wary, and Thor sees no purpose in doing anything other than taking a hold of his point and thrusting it in the mortal’s face.

“You know of his condition.”

His eyes widen, but only barely; this is a man accustomed to containing his surprise. “He doesn’t exactly call it that, but yeah. I know.”

“And how did you come to know of it?”

Thor’s words manage to be light despite the weight of memory and imagined slight behind them; though he knows neither Loki nor himself had come to this untouched, he cannot help the jealousy. Barton’s answering shrug is light, almost careless. “I’m not sure I could tell you that – and not because I don’t want to.” The flint of his eyes is unstruck, patient as he speaks over Thor’s opening mouth. “I watch. I wait. Information comes to me, I assimilate it, then I know it. It’s just that half the time I don’t even know how I acquired it in the first place.”

“You expect me to believe that you just _realised_ he was carrying a child?”

“Well, Loki’s not likely to give that kind of information away for free.” Thor’s eyes narrow while Barton’s remains unblinking, the gaze of a hunter – one in flight, high above the world below. “Put it this way: I figured it out only because he _wanted_ me to know.”

“To what purpose?”

“You tell me.” His head tilts, and there’s an element of dubiousness to his question. “You are the one who knows him best, right?”

“In some respects, perhaps.”

Admitting that is painful, and he has not quite the strength to shield the man from it. Barton takes this information, turns it over in silence, and then frowns. “You don’t trust him?”

“I trust his devotion both to Asgard, and myself.”

He almost smiles at the reflexive swiftness of his answer. “And what about his devotion to Loki?”

The wryness of his own answer is not quite able to be contained. “There is that, yes.”

Apparently content to let that lie for the time being, Barton leans back in his chair further still and crosses his arms over his chest; arm muscles move with strong ease beneath the short sleeves of his armoured shirt. “You think it’s weird he took a shine to me.”

“Loki is not best known for his sentiment when it comes to the acquisition of companions, no.”

“What does make him sentimental, then? Or devoted?” The pause is brief, his answer low. “His children.”

That sends a shock through Thor. “He spoke of the others?”

Barton’s eyes are sharp. “Only Sleipnir. He won’t confirm or deny the others, no matter how often Stark tries to trip him up on them.”

“But he spoke to you of others?” Thor is insistent, and Barton raises an eyebrow in languid arch.

“Hel, Fenrir, and Jörmungandr. Yeah. …though Stark actually thought Freki was Fenrir, ended up asking if he needed to stock up on hands. Even got to the point of asking if Fenrir was a leftie or a rightie, or just swung both ways like his daddy.”

“I think I do not understand this remark.”

“Buddy, you don’t want to.” Though he has allowed himself a brief chuckle at this, it evaporates a moment later. “Why does it bother you?”

There is much knowledge Thor cannot give, and not only because he remains unsure as to what Loki himself wishes known. “It is not common knowledge on Asgard.”

“Men getting knocked up isn’t the done thing, then?”

“We have not made it so, no.”

“So it really is your kid.” His eyes have dropped, and his fingers are moving in low circles, tip to tip, when he looks up again. “I know I just said that our legends seem to be off the mark, but that _definitely_ wasn’t in any of the ones I remember reading. In fact, one of Loki’s kids killed you, if I remember right. The serpent. Jörmungandr, right?”

“I have heard the tale, yes,” he says; all have heard prophecies without number of the end of the cycle. Loki’s name has often come up, but many assumed it is by reputation; he is seiðmaðr and trickster, after all. But as Thor thinks upon it now, a cold feeling settles like ice within his heart. He remembers the vault, the way Loki had railed against his not-father, and when he speaks it is through numb lips. “Things are changing.”

“What _things_?”

“All things, I should think.” He runs a hand back through his own dishevelled hair, aching again for Loki, for the truth of the matter they are so entangled within. “I believe your Anthony Stark has some idea of the depth of this. More so than even your commander, perhaps.”

“Stark’s got a way with the big things, trust me.” And Barton frowns, eyes fixed upon the quiver and bow before him on the table. “Fury’s good at what he does, but he’s got a much narrower viewpoint. Stark can seem like a wildcard, but he assimilates things a lot better.”

Crossing his arms over his own chest, Thor purses his lips and only just manages to speak around them. “I am starting to see why Loki finds you so interesting.”

“And here I thought it was just because of how we met.”

Thor almost wants to laugh; much as the thought of anyone seeking to harm his brother galls him still, he cannot deny he feels considerable pride at how easily Loki had caught the arrow just moments ago. “Well, to Loki, trying to put an arrow through his eye could be taken as a sign of affection. …not that I often do it.”

“There are worse things, I suppose,” he mutters, and Thor cannot help his next abrupt question. It is, after all, in many ways the reason why he wished to speak to Barton now.

“Do you trust him?”

And he is unsurprised. “Well, put it this way – while I don’t think he’s actively working for our best interests, at the moment he’s not working against them.” When he tilts his head now, his eyes are blue shadows. “But I think that could change real quick if we pissed him off.”

“I cannot imagine he would do Midgard any harm, Agent Barton.”

“No offense, but I think I have a better imagination than you.” Before Thor can protest such judgement, Barton shakes his head again. “But let me ask you something – do _you_ trust him?”

“I trust it is not his intention to bring any harm to those who do not deserve it.”

Barton watches him, and he is again reminded of the unhooded gaze of a hunting raptor upon its trainer’s gauntlet, waiting to be loosed to the sky. When he speaks again it is with a casualness so deceptive at first Thor does not realise what has been said. “You know, you’re no-where near the liar your brother is.”

A moment later, it hits him with the full force of an avalanche. “ _What_?”

“Oh, yeah. I know he’s your brother.” One hand, supported by an archer’s guard, rises to wave away further query. “Before you ask, he didn’t tell me. Like the kid, I think he just intended for me to know it.”

His heart thunders hard in his chest, his words utterly out of time with its staccato beat. “And how did you come to be so sure of _that_?”

The shrug bears some wry amusement. “From your reaction just now, mostly. Or at least, that proved it. Mostly it was just…” For the first time Barton actually appears discomforted. “…the stories, they’re made up. But the way he talks about you, it’s all truth no matter how much he says he lies.”

To that, Thor cannot speak. From Barton’s rueful look, he understands all too well the same feeling.

“This makes no sense,” Thor says, finally, and Barton actually laughs.

“And you’re not even the one who just discovered aliens were real. …or at least, that characters in a book can come to life and make better pancakes than you.” One hand swipes across his short hair as he tilts his head. “I _am_ going to miss his pancakes, actually. How in the hell does royalty learn how to cook, anyway?”

“Over a campfire, generally,” Thor mutters as he rubs at one temple. His head aches and he wishes for little more than to shake his father awake and demand of him the truth of Loki’s adoption and the Vanir interference in their hunt, but wishes have always been for children. “Truly, I feel I should read some of these tales both you and Stark have spoken of,” he says instead, and Barton blinks.

“The Norse myths? What, to see what they got wrong?” Straightening now, Barton’s eyes have taken on a tilt that does not exactly leave Thor comfortable. “Or are you more concerned about what they got right?”

In the same way theories of Ragnarök are passed about by rumour and ballad, all Æsir are aware the mortals have told their own stories of the golden kingdom. It was the price, the Allfather had said, of allowing the Midgardians their ignorant neutrality at the centre of the World Tree. But Loki had many years beforehand been fascinated by those stories; many times the Allfather had passed them off as echoes, of cycles not yet passed or passing. _How many cycles?_ Thor’s gut clenches as he thinks of tales of Loki at the centre of chaos, his children and his churlishness bringing everything to an end. _And what is the Allfather hiding from us, by withholding that information?_

And when he thinks of the weapons buried in a guarded mausoleum beneath the throne room, he shudders.

 _“The weapons vault is no place for enemy spawn,”_ Loki had shouted, eyes damp with tears and betrayal. _“Because that’s what I am, aren’t I? A weapon. A tool. Something that might once have been of use, had I not been broken already.”_

 _You are only yourself_ , Thor whispers, but in his mind only he can hear the scream behind it. The tesseract is well beyond Thor’s ken and he knows it; certainly he would be of no use in any attempt to regain it, even if he had not been bound to Asgard and the army he leads from her golden halls. Nothing in him can doubt the veracity of Loki’s claim as to its power and potential, and the Vanir are steeped in seiðr. Loki is simply the best one to remain, though his stomach twists at the very idea.

 _Damn you, Father_ , he thinks, sudden and harsh. _How dare you leave us all like this…you See all, perhaps, but then you know nothing. You took Loki from Jötunheimr because you feared what he could do, what he would be…but he is mine, as I am his. And I am Asgard. How, then, could you ever dream of believing that Loki could destroy that which he loves most?_

His face is carved of granite when he turns to Barton and speaks with the low rumble of the bedrock upon which Yggdrasil herself sits. “If Loki is ever in trouble, I need you to contact Asgard.”

“Wouldn’t he do that anyway?”

Thor almost wants to smile, in despair and amusement alike. “Do you believe Loki is one to ask for aid easily?”

The man watches for a long moment, expression unreadable. Then, he gives little more than a nod. “Point.” There’s something quick going on behind those sharp eyes, however.  “You want me to keep my mouth shut about this with the others?” Barton asks finally, one hand flicking in three directions. “I’d say they have it all on candid camera, but then I think Loki knows what you wanted to talk to me about, so maybe not.”

Thor follows the hand, catches nothing of deep import. “Candid camera?”

But Barton already shrugs off his own unease. “I think Loki lets us see what he wants us to see,” he says instead, half-cryptic as he gives Thor a look through narrowed eyes, as if viewing him from some great distance. “And I think you know that feeling better than any of us.”

The truth of that aches in his bones. It cannot be denied; Thor and Loki’s shared lives have been a battle long-fought. For all he loves his brother, for all he would not seek to change him, he suddenly wishes it did not have to be this way. “This is not about Loki and his needs, not alone,” he says, sudden and very nearly rough. “It is about the Nine Realms…and perhaps even those beyond.”

“I was never into Norse mythology as a kid. Hell, I wasn’t even into stories at all – got my dose of the weird and wonderful just by waking up in the morning and joining the rest of the circus folk. But you… you’re a real three ring circus, you guys.” Though he is without his bow and quiver, when he stretches, Thor cannot think him unarmed. “I just wish I knew who the ringmaster was.”

“I can assure you that it is not Wagner, Agent Barton.”

“Oh, that’s helpful,” he says, turning towards a second door Thor had not noticed. “I really wasn’t in the mood to sit through any German opera – hell, I could barely cope with that Russian ballet Tash dragged me to.”

Loki steps from the shadows, skin like moonlight. Thor shivers, the roused thoughts of death and destruction moving through his mind like a hurricane. He has no idea how to speak of any of this to his brother – but then, Loki’s attention is fixed upon Barton anyway. “In all honesty I wouldn’t be entirely inclined to inviting you to the opera; I simply cannot imagine you would have any idea how to appreciate it, for starters.”

“Depends on whether you’d let me shoot anything that got on my nerves. Very few things in this world can’t be improved by an arrow through the vitals.”

And his low smile is like that of a trainer to the goshawk that has brought its hunted prey. “You will always be my favourite, I should think,” he murmurs, and Barton shakes his head.

“I think I’m going to go hide.” Yet there is something almost deferent in the way he inclined his head to Loki, and then removes himself from the room with a silent grace that would have been the envy of many birds of prey. Thor turns his gaze back to Loki. _You are beautiful_ , he thinks, sudden and fierce. _You are beautiful and you are mine and I care not for what the Norns would have us do. If we are but instruments for the gods to play upon, then are we not gods ourselves? Can we not play upon one another, have done with fates none of us would wish for?_

He has gone beyond his brother’s ken; his voice comes from a distance, concerned and cautious. “Thor?”

Falling back to reality, Thor blinks, can only give one word in return. “Loki.”

There are many questions writ there with a subtlety that is not usually his wont; Loki chooses to ignore it, swaying careless and questing until they stand but moments apart. “Muninn tells me that you must return to Asgard. The war rages on without you, brother.” Though he draws close, he braces his hands upon his chest as if on the verge of pushing him away. “They have need of you.”

“As I have need of _you_.” And he breathes the truth against his lips like an incantation, wanting nothing more than to press himself deep within, to absorb every fact and every fear Loki has ever borne without sharing. “Brother.”

And now Loki does draw back, just scarcely out of reach. “And I need the tesseract,” he says, and Thor’s lips tighten.

“Is that really all there is to this?” He hates the way his voice trembles somewhere between fury and frustration, shot through with uneasy fear. He believes his brother, he trusts in him implicitly, but he knows Loki tells his truths only after first wrapping them three times round with a garrotte of lies. “Is that truly the only reason why you came here?”

“You have your knowledge, and they have theirs.” Long fingers trace ward-patterns in broken curve over his cheekbone, his eyes somehow distant the closer he comes, his smile both freedom and shackle alike as he presses it against Thor’s lips. “And now you have work to do, brother mine. You must go.”

The actual goodbye with Loki is not how he would have it. The Midgardians seem to believe that they have had privacy enough, and Stark mentions something loud about insufficient soundproofing that has Loki sweetly returning that he would be pleased to teach him a spell if only he would deign to be taught; when Loki lists his credentials as a trainer of domestic beasts, things almost turn ugly. In the end, Thor’s proclamation is what silences even these mortals who live beyond the technical boundaries of his golden kingdom.

Loki is a private person. But then he appears to have an exhibitionist streak Thor had never quite been privy to before, given the recent incidents of the throneroom and the small chamber with their doubles. Thor supposes with some ruefulness that the only greater need of a trickster than his magics would be his audience.

Therefore Loki displays no shame as he holds Thor’s face between his palms and presses a kiss to his lips. Yet for all that, it is almost chaste; after but a moment he draws back, leans their foreheads together. Though his eyes remain closed and his lips still, Thor can almost feel the ever-turning kaleidoscope of thought that is Loki’s great mind. Then he opens them, the rich green as startling as sunlight upon leaves after a storm. Thor thinks vaguely of the verdant fields of Vanaheimr’s valleys, overhung with mist and rain, and feels faint unease. He does not understand all, but he feels now he understands enough to know that he will never truly know what it is that Loki does.

“You come home,” he says, sudden, voice thick with need and demand. “Do what you must here, but then you come _home_.”

Loki lets the words remain unsaid between them, the depth of his gaze more truth than his words. “I promise you, I will come to you. Always, Thor.”

It should have ended there, perhaps – they still have their curious mortal audience, and Sif stands near with one hand casual upon the hilt of her sheathed sword. Still, there is one thing he has not had a chance to say. “Loki,” he says, quiet and urgent, “what you spoke of, the seiðr…”

Even as he stumbles, Loki catches his tangled thought. “It was the truth.” Thor is already frowning but Loki is shaking his head, hands still cradling his jaw. “I am not offended. The truth of the matter is that you are the warrior, and I the sorcerer.” His voice deepens, a lover’s soft conviction as he leans forward, lips against his. “We are what Odin was at his greatest,” he whispers. “Because of that we can remake the world as he did…together.” And then he draws back, a spark of true mischief lighting his eyes from some secret place deep within. “Although, in a way, we already have.”

At first Thor does not quite take his meaning. Then his eyes widen, skipping downward. All his fears flare anew, the cycle of Ragnarök strong in his mind. “The child—”

“ _We_ are what he fears.” The interruption is as sinuous as the press of Loki’s body all along his. “Not just the child,” he adds quietly, and his hands move down, distraction and delight. “Thor, I can show you something before you go.”

They are not alone, Thor remembers. But as Loki gives brief undulation, the press of sharp hipbone and soft swell of abdomen, he wishes to forget. “What?”

“You say you know nothing of seiðr, but there is this power in you.”

Looking up from beneath his half-lowered eyelids, Loki’s lips move in wicked curve as one hand slides sideways to rest upon Mjölnir’s head. Thor cannot suppress the jolt that rocks his entire being; it many ways it feels more intimate a contact than had Loki simply palmed him through his trousers. He must swallow hard before he has voice enough to reply. “That is not seiðr. It is elemental…divine. It was a gift.”

“As is my seiðr.” Giving a little hum of satisfaction, he ripples fingertips over her runed head and smirks to see the flush rising to the other’s cheeks. “They may not be worked in the same way, they may not be the same material, but at their heart they are both threads. We wove them together once.” Their bodies fit so well together Thor cannot imagine how they have ever managed to live apart as Loki whispers into his ear: “ _Do this for me, Thor_.”

“Do what?”

“Do as you do when you call the thunder.” And he laughs at the muddled look this earns him from his brother, palm pressed to the ridged shaft of Mjölnir’s handle. “Do not summon it, truly. Just…let your mind go to the place it does when it seeks your divine calling.”

Though never one for eloquence at the best of times, with the insistent pressure of Loki’s fingers against Mjölnir and his body against his, Thor can barely move beyond syllable. “But why?”

And Loki only smiles, hand now working in relentless up and down upon Mjölnir’s shaft; Thor begins to wonder if it would be possible for Loki to bring him off by that alone. But it is not what Loki wants of him, though he thinks perhaps narrowing his attention upon the hammer is the reason for it. Turning his mind more fully to the weapon bound to both body and soul, he opens his heart to her. He always hears it: the faint hum of Mjölnir’s massed power, ever ready to respond to his call. Now, he does not encourage her to full song as he would when raising her to war. Rather, he just gives himself to her, warrior to weapon without any battle in sight, and Loki’s _hands_ —

His head arches back with a gasp. Everything is bright, everything is _brilliant_ , and he cannot breathe for the alien nature of it. There’s something in it of Vanaheimr, of how he had felt when pressed between the twinned Lokis only hours before – it reminds him, too, of how it is when he seeks Loki, when he feels his absence. But in this he finds a sense of Loki everywhere. Bright and dark, clever and cunning, watchful and laughing and thoughtful and strange and _perfect_.

_The greatest of beginnings, wrapped in the guise of every ending the Allfather ever feared._

“You see?” he whispers, and Thor does not think it is spoken aloud. “You can feel it, can’t you?”

Wonder moves through him with all the force of a storm – one beyond his ken and control, and somehow all the more beautiful for it. He’d thought he’d felt it, once, when they had come together the first time upon a bloodied altar and wrought sudden life between them. But this…this is not himself. He feels taken over, subsumed; this is not the two of them together. This is _Loki_ , and he can feel his heart thundering in time with Loki’s lightning-quick laughter. “ _This_ is your seiðr?”

“This is part of it,” he says, voice curving in amusement as his other hand moves, takes Thor’s. “And this is a part of me.”

Long fingers close about his wrist, draw the unprotesting palm to press it over his own abdomen. And Thor jerks as if electrified, eyes wide and mouth open and his voice stuttering with the third: a heartbeat below and beyond the two he already knows so deep in his soul.

And his heart feels to be breaking and remaking both together as he whispers: “This is our child?”

“ _Yes_.” Loki’s face is brilliant with elation, eyes snapping green fire. “Too young to quicken in body, but I felt the moment the child quickened in spirit.”

Moving his fingers, Thor feels again that beat, the insistent thrum of new life lurking beneath the protective mantle of that which holds it close. “He’s…alive.”

“Yes.”

And he looks up, overwhelmed by he knows not what: the true sensation of Loki’s soul and seiðr, wrapped about his own like a cradling cocoon…or the knowledge that their child is held in the same cradle, waiting only to be born. “Loki,” he whispers, and finds there is nothing more to say. “ _Loki_.”

“Thor.” Tenderness moves from him in waves, his hand pressed over Thor’s. “I would never do anything to allow harm to this child.” His next words are scarce breath against his lips. “ _And never doubt that I love you_.”

Then Loki lets go, both of Mjölnir and their hands, and digs his nails so deep into Thor’s neck that it should draw blood. But Thor answers the same, their kiss openmouthed and desperate, as if to consume. Thor wishes nothing more than to pretend the worlds have ended, that they exist only in the chaos between the cycles, untempered and free; he wishes nothing more than to strip his brother bare and have him here, hard and hot and hungry. But there are others, there are—

“Loki, the mortals—”

“Cannot see this,” he says, and he is laughing again as he snaps his hips, drives an insistent erection against his brother’s thigh. “I can hold the illusion of mere conversation over us long enough for this short exchange.”

“Only…conversation?”

How Loki can keep laughing when Thor can barely breathe is but one of the many mysteries his brother keeps to himself, even as his hand moves teasing and low. “You wish for another show?”

“A private one, perhaps.” Thor draws back, flushed and wanting, hand dropping from Loki’s neck to rest, shaking, upon Mjölnir. There is responsibility to her weight, and it is heavy upon both mind and shoulder when he shakes his head with deep regret. “But I must return to Asgard, and Vanaheimr.”

Loki’s hand moves over his cheek, gentle in a way that somehow reminds Thor of the easy eternal trust of their mother. “And so you shall,” he says, and Thor’s memory takes a leap sideways.

“Oh! I’ve brought you something from home!”

Loki blinks. “A gift?”

“When I took my leave of Mother, she was entertaining Iðunn in her solar. And she…she said she thought of you.” He looks up, expression all uncertain query. “Apparently the apple she chose is very good for expectant mothers.”

“That was kind of her,” he muses with no surprise at all; Thor must frown, his hand moving upwards to gently incline his brother’s face back to him.

“Loki, how many people know?”

Though he does not protest the movement, the faint line bisecting his brow shows his displeasure. Thor’s hand drops away, even as Loki gives a brief shrug. “More than you realise, but likely now less than you think.” His own hand rests upon his abdomen once more, following its growing curve. “It will out, sooner or later.”

“I will not let anyone seek to shame you,” Thor responds, immediate and fierce, but already Loki is turning.

“We shall see,” he says, and a hand trails behind him like a loosed leash. “Come, then.”

Only when they stand later upon the runic tether of the Bifröst does Thor take the satchel Sif as borne since the beginning of their journey. Retrieving the silken bundle that had been carefully pressed into one corner, the material woven upon Frigga’s own loom, Thor hands it to Loki who accepts with equal reverence.

“I shall eat every morsel.”

“You could even plant the pips.”

Thor’s suggestion seems to surprise Loki, who looks up with wide eyes; they return to a narrowed smirk a second later. “I shouldn’t think such soil would breed such glory, alas.” And yet for all his immediate denial there is a hint of whimsy in his words; it evaporates a moment later when he adds carefully: “But that is not the fertile ground you need concern yourself with.”

“I love you.”

Again, something very close to surprise flashes in his brother’s eyes. Then his smile turns wry, and he shakes his head. “Go kill something, Thor,” he advises kindly, “you look to be rather in need of it.”

There is but one last kiss. Then, Thor and Sif spiral back through the universe to home and beyond.

 

*****

 

“It simply seems too much like this is where they want us to be.” One hand drums fingertips against the great oak table that serves as the heart of their field station, the other curving about a flagon of mead barely touched; only great strength of will stays his hand from flinging it across the tented room. “I cannot explain, but…yes. It feels right in the theory. Our position is strong, and our army is prepared to face foes much greater than that which our scouts say await us below. And yet in that everything feels completely and utterly _wrong_.”

This time he nearly does make the throw; a quick hand plucks the mug free, and its owner takes a long slug though it is the king’s cup. “It is not like you to be so uncertain in your victories,” Fandral observes as he sets the drink back upon the table, and Thor gives him an arch look.

“This is not victory.”

“It is _a_ victory. But I understand this is not the war won.” Smoothing a hand over his beard, impossibly well-trimmed and shining even in the depths of the war front, Fandral moves his own eyes again over the weighted maps spread before the council Thor has called to his tent. “Though in the end, do we even truly know who we are fighting against?”

Even with another moons-turn of campaign that answer cannot be clearly given by anybody. Outside the city walls all those days ago, as the capital had burned within Loki had spoken of the dead king and his sister. They’d been no grief to it; Njörðr and Loki had never been particularly fond of one another, though Thor had found him gentle and retiring enough. Though neither quality necessarily works well to a king, until this passing Vanaheimr had seemed content in her treat-quietened state. The sister Thor had not known at all; he feels almost to know less of her now despite the battles they wage. Still, at least he has learned her name.

“Nerþuz,” he says, and it tastes of salt and the open sea upon his dry lips. Sif’s returned question hangs low in the lamplight.

“You think she will come to us now?”

“We have brought them to an impasse. There is no way from this valley that does not pass through our men, and to the best of our knowledge there are no further rebels to support them,” Týr reports with a commander’s ease, and Thor somehow nods and shakes his head at the same time. The older Æsir’s voice cuts the air in the manner of a roughened blade, and bears sarcasm as its default rather than a chosen state. It can be difficult to tell the man’s true meaning, but in this Thor knows Týr’s impatience.

“I do understand this.”

“But still you feel the upper hand is not ours.” His weather-worn features tighten, paying court to long-held prejudice. “Thor, just because Loki is not here, you need not play at his games of seeing the shadow cast by every shard of light given.”

“And does not this feel to you as though it was given?”

“Are you saying we did not fight for this victory?”

Such arguments always escalate quickly between the two; they are warriors of a kind, Týr and Thor, born to war and discord. Fandral and Volstagg are moving to protest when a messenger is hurriedly announced. The windswept and rain-dampened youth steps quick to bow his head low before Thor, while Týr seethes still at his side.

“My king.” Breathing hard, he says no more; he bears no parchment, and no raven moves in his shadow. Irascible, temper more than half-roused by Týr’s baiting, Thor cannot hold back his annoyance.

“Well, what is it, then?”

And the messenger, scarce more than a page fresh from the palace’s scribe-halls, looks up with eyes as wide and frightened as the sky before an oncoming storm. “An envoy from the Vanir and their queen.”

In the silence that follows the pronouncement never has he ached more for his brother’s counsel. Thor has been raised to this as much as he, but his body hums with energy not yet released. It is the catharsis of battle he yearns for; if he could, he would bring down the worlds entire if only it would return Loki to his side.

But his father had always taught his sons there was something more than mindless war in any struggle between people and place, no matter how compelling the siren-song of the berserker bloodlust. Therefore Thor rises to his feet and nods brusque to the messenger.

“So,” he says, low pronouncement like that of a bill of attainder. “The Vanir come to speak with us at last. So shall we go, and see what tell they have for our royal ear?”

But far from taking this as a patriotic call to arms, the man almost seems to squirm in the face of Thor’s hard divinity. “It…is not a Vanir.” A tongue passes over dry lips, but his voice rasps still. “He is Midgardian.”

“Midgardian?” For a moment it seems as though this alien world has tilted beneath his feet, reversing its spin to throw him clear and laughing all the while. “Midgard has no part in this war.”

 _But it does_ , an insistent voice whispers; he can feel Sif stiffening at his side, can feel the uneasy ripple of rumour already beginning to disturb the cool waters of his staff. _All know that Loki travelled to Midgard to seek out our salvation. All know this, and it is but natural that all should now suspect—_

“Bring him.”

But Thor must also move to his position. Leaving the tent to take his place within a circle, with an impromptu mobile þing with him at its head he does not do so alone. The Warriors Three, Týr, and Sif flank him in wordless strength, all with arms to easy hand. Despite the dust and dirt of long days upon campaign his red cloak billows out behind him in a banner of brilliant red, hair glint gold even though the Vanir sun hides behind the ever-present clouds. The rising wind bears upon its chill the scent of the sea, and remembers how Njörðr had been named god of such matters. The oceans heave and twist in sorrow, uneasy with his absence; countless ships have been lost to its mourning, and Thor does not doubt the restless god will demand more before he finds his rest in the halls of Valhalla.

The ambassador has come to the Æsir camp alone. Cloaked though he is, something familiar in the way he moves has Thor tilting his head, eyes narrowing. The two flanking Einherjar are much taller than he is, but he matches the warrior step with a grace impaired only by unseen injury. It is only when he looks up, pale eyes hard and mortal face cold, that Thor feels recognition knife into him like a poisoned arrowhead.

“Barton.” Mjölnir sparks at his side, though he calls her not yet. “What treachery is this?”

The archer is unmoved by the roiling fury of the god before him. “You tell me,” he says, flat and furious in his own turn, a forking trail of blood moving from hairline in fractured path down his too-pale cheek. “Although you’d better make it quick. Because they’re saying they’re going to kill him if you don’t give them what they want.”

Thor’s hand is now fully about Mjölnir, his vision half-hazed and reddening by the moment. His heart thunders in his ears but still he speaks with flat fury as if they are merely in that tiny Midgardian chamber again.

“They have Loki.”

“And good luck to them with that.” The corner of his lip quirks up. “Am I right?”

 _You are right_ , his warrior soul whispers in rising song. But he manages to speak still in with even serenity. “Ah, but they won’t kill him.” He almost smiles, the memory of death sharp upon his tongue. “Loki carries what they want.”

“Half of it, maybe.” He takes a breath; only the briefest spasm of pain speaks of ribs perhaps broken, an abdomen distended by bruising and swelling. “You know what I mean.”

Thor’s bitterness ought to have been acid enough to burn through the world entire. “They wish the tesseract, too.”

“So much for leaving Midgard out of this dance, yeah?”

A babble of voices explodes, then. Thor lets it wash over him, just noise. All just _noise._ This is not what his father would have willed of him; they exist to protect the realms, from themselves and each other.

 _And from us, too_.

But they have taken Loki. Thor cannot be sure of the game the declared queen is playing, or even the game Loki has raised in return, but there are things he _is_ sure of. This is the chiasmus where their fates entwine, where the weave can be worked anew in whatever pattern they choose. And for all the Vanir bear prophecy deepest of all those hung upon the World Tree, Thor has felt Loki’s strength – and he has always known his own.

 _We are what he fears_ , Loki had whispered. And for the first time Thor begins to understand why. The world, Yggdrasil herself, feels to tremble beneath his weight as he takes a foot forward.

“You are here to take me to my brother?”

“Do you want to come?”

And Thor laughs. It rolls like thunder in the damp valley of Vanir’s encroaching defeat. His blood is boiling and his rage is burning and he will have to kill to take Loki back. That is nothing, that is not new. But remaking reality entire…well, that might be something different indeed. Something irreversible, irrevocable, the beginning brought about only by the darkest of endings.

“I want everything.”

And somehow he can’t regret that at all.


	10. The Awful Daring Of A Moment’s Surrender

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And lo, it takes me far too long again to get anything written. I honestly don't know what to say about that; even though I have a good idea of where the story is to go and I frankly want to see how the whole thing plays out, I...well. I'm one of those writers who tends to see the art of storytelling more as an act of secretarial assistance. I don't tell the story myself, I just write it down. And given the pig's ear I've been making of it as of late, I keep expecting the muses to sigh, shake their heads sadly, and say: "Look, you're a nice girl and all, and you try awfully hard, but I think we're going to have to draw the line here and let you go."
> 
> ...
> 
> So, yes, once again you have my apologies for the state of the story. It's rather ironic, mind you; I started out writing this concerned by the fact that there was little story and just badly-written smut; it seems to have done a complete reversal on that front and is now all ill-conceived story with no smut whatsover. Hmm. I do apologise, too, for the fact that I'm just taking elements of Norse mythology and doing whatever I like with them.
> 
> On a more cheerful note, mind you, one thing that _did_ get me back into the writing of this was that the other week I was noodling around on tumblr, as I often do, and [I came across this post](http://pocketloki.tumblr.com/post/31302802856/i-became-awake-a-thor-loki-fic-rec-fanmix-chaos). When I started reading it I was having a little fit anyway because the Clint Mansell song it mentions first has been quite dear to me for some years now but then I caught my name and this fic and just about had a heart attack. And the associated song...oh, just listen to it. It's beautiful. I'd never heard it before, but it's solidly a part of my Depressing Instrumentals iTunes playlist forever, now. And I listened to it rather a bit while working on this chapter. And the whole fanmix is genuinely fantastic anyway, let me tell you.
> 
> And just for a few more feels: I also kept listening to [the album version of this song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcb3CS7oUlQ) while writing this. It's not directly relevant...yet. Er. Although if I get fired by these muses we may never quite know where that was going...which might have been for the best, really.
> 
> ...um. Yeah. Frankly, given the way things are going, I'll be surprised if there's anyone out there even still reading this anymore. D:

With Mjölnir to hand, arrayed in full armour with Megingjörð about waist and Járngreipr serving as vambraces, Thor goes to those who had brought Barton to the edge of the Aesir encampment. The presumed escort waits for their arrival: small, but fiercely arrayed for it. Much as his skin prickles, muscles beneath urging that he shun words and give over all to blood and broken bone, Thor moves forward with hard eyes and his warhammer held low.

There are half a dozen men and one woman; she is at their head upon a great mare, watchful and smiling. As Thor approaches she slips from the saddle, armour and weapon both an easy weight caught upon the balls of her feet. She comes to meet him with a swaggering ease that curls wrath about Mjölnir’s head with restless urgency. The tilt of head and wrist says she wants to strike as much as he, but they both hold that thin veneer of civility like masks over their true faces when they at last stand before one another.

Under any other circumstance he might have thought her handmaiden to her mistress – but then, it seems the Vanir queen has no compunctions such as Asgard in regards to women upon the field. She has a shock of rich red hair with matched freckles splayed across a small nose, her lips rosebud pout. But that is all that is soft about her; her arms are strongly muscled, her thighs thick and well-formed beneath her mail, and her morning star shines as bright as the killing gleam in her dark eyes.

“I am not here to take you to him,” she says with no preamble or grace of purpose. “You will not see him before morning break.”

He thinks Loki would be proud, amused, or perhaps both together that he merely arches an eyebrow and does not immediately snap her neck. “And who are you to deny me my brother?”

Her smile broadens. “My name is Sigrdrífa.”

“You are no Valkyrie,” he observes with dry disregard, and she lets laughter gurgle low in her throat.

“I bear the name with honour all the same.” One booted foot taps heavy against even the squelching underfoot, eyes with a sharp biting intelligence Thor has not often seen beyond the raven-fetches of his father. “The Queen would prepare for your visit, and despite having sent you word of your brother she is not yet ready for your coming.”

But Mjölnir is; she sings heavy beneath his grip. “If she was so concerned for formalities, then why send the Midgardian to my camp now?”

“Her mind is a mystery even to those closest to her.” When she laughs, it is low harsh pulse. “You, of all people, should know how that is!”

Unease creeps along his skin like the blind slime of a worm seeking fresh water. “You know nothing of me.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say _that_ , Odinson.”

“I am King of Asgard.”

“While the Allfather sleeps,” she corrects, breathtaking in her arrogance even in the face of his frosted words. “And you should sleep, too. It shall be a long day, upon the morrow.”

“I would see my brother.” It is no request. “Now.”

“No.” And even in the face of Mjölnir’s rise, so casual and easy she is in her defiance of the god-king of golden Asgard. “Your brother’s pet can vouch for his health when he left, yes?”

At the jerk of her head, Barton’s shoulders stiffen. But his eyes are steady and his voice even as he looks at her and speaks to Thor. “I can say he was fine when I left him and nothing more.”

“Ah, but then, there is _this_.”

She holds it extended in one hand. With a frown Thor flicks a hand forward. Though he suspects mortals do not have kings and queens in the fashion of the other realms, Barton appears to take his meaning well enough; he steps forward to take the paper from her taunting fingers before giving it over to Thor. Unfolding it for himself, he recognises immediately his brother’s script: all careful looping over the starkness of the runes he has chosen.

_Wait for morning. I am well; it has not been so long since I last tasted your golden gift. Give me time, enough. It will be well._

The hidden meaning is tight about his heart. The last time he had seen his brother, Loki had held Iðunn’s apples in hand. And then, he can cast back further still, to Loki’s pale face as he asked for trust and faith before leaving that damned dank cell of memory too close to ever be easy…

“We will do him no harm, Odinson. He is our most…honoured prisoner.”

“You would be a fool to think him your true prisoner.” Thor’s smile is a broken blade, Loki’s words crumpled in his hand as if he could absorb paper and ink and the person who had used both into his skin. “If you truly sought to hurt him, he would bring this world down around your fool ears.”

“You are very clever to say so,” she murmurs, and there’s something knowing in her eyes he cannot like. But she is already bowing low in the fashion of a man, hands mockingly wide as she takes one, two, three full steps backward. “And so I take my leave of you, Odinson. I shall return in the morning to escort you to your brother, and my queen.”

There are councils to be had, when they return. But there is one person he wishes to speak to at greater length first. Barton again senses as much with an ease that cannot help but startle him, for all Loki had said he was very quick. But as they begin a slow loop of the outer perimeter, night but a dark shadowed promise high above their heads where the light has already fled from the sky, he supposes Loki would not have had it any other way.

To his credit, the mortal seems none the worse for wear despite the fact Thor cannot believe the Vanir have been kind to him; to have been taken and used as he has been, it is apparent they believe him Loki’s mortal thrall. But he holds his head high despite a stiffness of back and shoulder Thor had noted when he had first been brought before him.

“Do you require a healer?”

“I would’ve thought they’ve got enough to do, given all this,” he replies without breaking stride. “I’m operational. Don’t waste your resources.”

“If you are my most direct link to Loki, then I can imagine no greater resource.”

“Wow, thanks for that,” he says, dry as summer sands, and Thor winces even as something in him takes amusement; certainly, he sees why his brother had spoken of finding amusement with this man.

“I do not intend to demean your worth, either as a soldier or representative of your realm, Agent Barton.”

“I know.” His eyes move again to the parched plains, despite the vast rains that had fallen upon them but hours ago. The land is thirsty. The balance is uneven. And the low rumble of brontide is not born of the sky by any means more natural than Thor’s own instinct to bloodlust and battle. Barton’s eyes follow his, and his smile turns ironic and low. “Frankly, I’m just glad you’re using words instead of lightning bolts.”

“Unfortunately it is known throughout all the realms that I have never been so eloquent as my brother.”

“Mmm, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing – and take that from someone who’s had to spend way too much time around Stark lately.” Pushing a hand back through his hair, as much a state as the rest of his bruised and bloody form, he casts another look about the camp. “Look, I know this is technically friendly territory, but I’ve been feeling a bit vulnerable lately. What with the kidnapping and all.”

“You wish to be armed, archer?”

“I don’t even have my knives.” Then he grimaces. “Well, technically, that’s a lie – I do have one. But it’s not mine. And it’s actually for you.”

He draws it easily, and then it lies in his palm like a promise: one of Loki’s small throwing knives, unbloodied and shining. But it is not whole: in its true state it is made of two faint curves that meet in an oval centre that does not close, lightly and simply hooked. It is a blade meant for spinning charge, thrown into flight by the centripedal force of his brother in lethal action.

This one lacks one of its sides, split clean down its centre. It hurts, to hold it. Because Loki would have fought. He knows when to stay his hand, when to keep his shadows; Thor had seen as much in Vanaheimr when all this had begun. He had played a different game there, buying for time as he sought another way out. Only when he and Loki had come together had Loki unleashed that volatile chaos he hides so well, married it to the steady force of Thor’s natural elemental power. But now, with a child carried inside him—

The memory of Sif, and of the startled expression upon her face when she had found him with Loki and Sleipnir, flares sudden-bright in his mind.

_(“Your brother is quick, and clever, and far more powerful than even perhaps he realises. If he had really wanted to escape Svaðilfari, I do not think anything in all the realms might have stopped him.”)_

A coiled, curling fear like a roused serpent stirs in his gut, wrapping around, clenching tight in tetanic spasm. _Jörmungandr_ , he thinks, and everything and nothing makes sense even as he closes his hand tight over Loki’s broken throwing dagger.

“You have not explained to me yet how he was taken.”

There’s something of an accusation in that. Though Thor knows he could not truly have expected the mortals to stand against the roused might of a Vanaheimr assault party, he still feels they owed Loki more than what they had obviously given him. And Barton knows it. Raising an eyebrow, he says with no real delicacy: “Well, I haven’t explained it to you, yet.”

Thor cannot fault him in this; he has not yet asked. And he looks down to the dagger, unblooded, the protective runes carved by Loki’s own hand wrapped in endless spiral about its ruined centre.

“It was the tesseract.”

The word prickles across his nape; he had known from the beginning, he thinks sourly, that playing with such things could only make the situation ever darker. “It was as with the force Loki originally repelled when first he came to your realm, then?”

Something in the archer’s eyes says that perhaps he understands more of Loki’s game than Loki had suspected. But then given the events it is hard to say if Loki had not intended as much all along. His head aches, and Barton looks not much better for it. “So goes the theory – at least when it comes to how they noticed him there. But they didn’t attack SHIELD, if that’s what you mean. It was more a surgical strike, when I was just talking to him up in my so-called nest.” His stride trips a little, brow furrowed as he looks to where he places his feet upon what, to him, is alien soil in every sense. “Look, I’m not going to pretend that I really understand _any_ of this. Tasha calls it all magic and monsters, and let me tell you now Loki sure as hell didn’t see fit to explain much of anything to me. But I’m getting the distinct impression that’s just the way he wanted it to be.”

His spine stiffens, a call to arms even as he stops dead. “What are you saying?”

“I actually have no goddamn clue.” His hands are at his side, a soldier at attention when he turns to face Thor. “But I think I’d prefer to be armed while I say it.”

And given the situation, Thor cannot think to deny him. With a nod of agreement, he moves onto something harder. “What did Loki tell you about the child he carries?”

Barton displays no surprise at the shift in topic. “He never actually confirmed that he was pregnant, you realise? Like I said back at Stark’s little playground tower, I just kind of realised it. And he never denied it.” Yet even he sounds sceptical of himself, even as he shrugs. “And come on, after everything else going on down there, what with Hawkings-types turning into huge green rage monsters and Coulson’s childhood hero being chipped out of an ice cube…aliens and invasions and then pregnant not-invading aliens? Not even the weirdest thing I’d seen that week.”

There are more tales in that wry summary and Thor has no idea if they are for the telling, at least in his hearing. But that is not their concern now. It is more that he begins again to see why Loki had favoured this mortal in his schemes, whatever they might truly be. Because Thor cannot help but believe this is all some long game Loki has been playing since their return from Vanaheimr, after their ill-fated hunting trip.

_(“Thor, whose idea was it, to go hunting that day?”)_

He does not know why it should bother him so, that he still cannot recall even though Loki is not here to accept the answer he hadn’t been able to give even then.

“Did he ever speak to you of prophecy?” he asks, and again Barton moves easily into the new thread of conversation, weaving his own swift pattern.

“To be honest, we never even _talked_ that much. He had a habit of watching me at training, and finding me at watch, but…I’m not a huge talker. And he seemed comfortable enough in the shadows. I don’t get to appreciate that sort of thing in many people.”

And that hurts, even though it must be pushed aside for now. “The child is subject of and to a very particular prophecy that neither Loki or I were privy to until very recently,” he says instead, though already he begins to doubt the veracity of such a claim. “However, there was a sect in Vanaheimr that had…some inkling of it. They were the ones who…somewhat inadvertently brought it to direct fruition.” He pauses, grimaces. “They wanted it to happen, of course. But not quite in the fashion it came to pass.”

The man really is very quick. Indeed, it is no wonder at all that Loki had chosen him. “This thing between you and him – it only started then?”

“It had been brewing for a very long time,” he admits, and not only to the archer. “Such a storm could not build so without ever breaking. But no, we had not…done such things. It is not common, either between men or those so closely related.”

“Was that part of the prophecy? Because I’m still rusty as hell on my Norse mythology, but I kind of remember something about Ragnarök being preceded by some great winter. And Stark said something about…unnatural relations.” Barton frowns deeper. “Actually, he wouldn’t shut up about it, Loki’s preferences or otherwise. You do _not_ want to see his youtube channels, believe you me.”

Thor has no idea of what he speaks, and it does not matter. “It was prophesised one thousand years ago at Jötunheimr, that the House of Odin would fall in this cycle at the hands of a child of Laufey-king’s line,” he says, heavy. “That child was given unto the Allfather.” And he wonders if it will ever not hurt to speak this truth aloud. “That child was Loki.”

“What – wait.” Barton’s head looks to be hurting again. “You’re not _actually_ brothers then?”

“By bond, yes.” Stubborn, he allows his hands to curl into warning fists. “But not by blood, no.”

“And you’re still – okay. Fine. Leave that, I don’t even want to know anymore.” He’s rubbing his head again; in that, Thor could almost think to pity him. “So the kid is the end of the world and you’re happy just to let Loki carry it to term?” The angle of his eyes is very long when he gives Thor a sideways look.  “And your dad’s okay with that, too?”

“The reason why we were raised as brothers is precisely because our father did not wish for this to happen, for the royal lines of Jötunheimr and Asgard to be joined in this way,” Thor returns, unable to keep the stiff edge from his words. “But it has happened, and I would not have it undone.”

“Because of the child?”

“Because of Loki,” he corrects, and his throat feels raw as ever. “Loki’s son is my child and I would not attribute sin to him simply because of a prophecy’s dark shadow. He was conceived in love and in trust, and because that fate need not be his choke chain nor yoke.”

Barton’s words are very flat. “So you’re fighting _destiny_ now.”

“Yes.”

He gives over to a low, slow release of air alien to his mortal lungs. “Always knew _he_ was crazy, but…” Raising his voice from the mutter, he gives Thor an ironic look. “I guess it explains the tesseract.”

Again Thor thinks of Loki’s serpentine son; by legend curled about Midgard like a loosened choke chain, and in reality a restless spirit left to stasis by the Allfather’s decree. He does not know if Loki would have gone to him. “I don’t know exactly what he wishes to do with it, perhaps, but from what has been said I imagine this is why.” His eyes move back over the valley, and the army that surrounds it like insects waiting to descend upon a fresh body that is not yet quite a corpse. “We need all the strength we can gather.”

The mortal nods with sharp resignation. “He wants to take it from us.”

“In truth it is not yours to keep.”

Barton does not argue this, but nor does he agree. “You know, I’m pretty sure that this wasn’t what I signed up for, SHIELD or not,” he says, and looks to Thor with a crooked grin. “It’s actually pretty sad, when even a circus is less crazy than your current job.”

“You should take some rest, Agent Barton.”

“Same goes for you.”

“I will not rest with my brother in their hands.” The bitter taste of it is too strong, flavoured with the memories that are not even entirely his own: his brother, wan and dignified both, rising from the dirty rushes of their cell to walk to the darkness beyond their prison door in the company of their captors. To do things he will not speak of for the good of those who had often given him so very little credit for all that he was and did in the name of the realm who named him always second.

And then, there are the memories he had taken from the ground itself, upon all fours in Vanaheimr in his brother’s skin: the voice in his ear, and the cock in his ass, and the weight of the curse upon his borrowed skin.

 _(“You are the mother of monsters_ – _so what is it to you, to birth one more? And perhaps this will be the perfect one, the one that the Allfather cannot slave nor chain nor banish nor abandon to the deep depths of a realm not its own. This one shall know freedom, and in that shall make the prison to hold them all_. _”)_

He shudders. There will be no sleep this night, not when his brother lies within reach but as far from his grasp as the stars above Asgard they’d counted so often as children. But they’d always come up with different answers. Loki’s sharp eyes had always sought out those all but shrouded in darkness, while Thor had always been blinded by the brightest and hard never bothered to look any deeper.

He stares at his hands now, and wonders what else he has failed to see in those skies he once thought to know so well.

 

*****

 

Vanaheimr is a land of rain and endless mists, the clouds constant maiden-veil over the sky. But this pulsing storm is unnatural and born from another realm. At its centre Mjölnir is a warm weight in his hand, her unease echoing that of her master. There is no thunder, there is no lightning, but the air is thick with charge, ionised and ready to spark to furious blazing shock with but a moment’s summoning.

And the brontide is all in the warning of his words, the heavy tread of boot as Thor moves to the prepared mounts. Sif and Barton flank him; Ullr, Fandral, and Týr are just behind. A dozen Einherjar will ride with him, cloaks emblazoned with the royal standard of the king’s personal guard. But a sudden thought has him turning to the mortal with a frown.

“Can you ride?”

“Sure.” And Barton places a foot into the stirrup and swings himself up with ease; there’s a slight tenseness to his seat, but to Thor’s knowing eye it speaks more of a dearth recent practise than actual inexperience. But it is not his place to be concerned. The man is a warrior of his own realm, and he will do as needs must.

Their Vanir escort awaits them as spoken. The queen’s fierce handmaiden at its head once more, with shield upon her back and morning star in easy reach at saddle. As a hail she gives him a broad grin, a skull with stretched skin and wild hair.

The ride into the valley is tense and wordless, bringing them into the sheltered curve of the cradling mountain. The queen’s place is a pavilion of silk and linen, her flags all fierce snap in the uneasy wind. The watchful eyes of an enemy army follow them as they draw close, dismount. The handmaiden is borne upon her easy arrogance, every muscle slim and strong beneath her sun-baked skin, as she stands before the king and his company.

“Your brother waits within, in attendance upon the queen,” Sigrdrífa says, eyes alight with mischief. “You may bring only one of your companions with you into her grace’s presence.” Protest ripples through the entire company without so much as a word, communicated merely by the movement of weapon, the tightening of stance and formation. Sigrdrífa’s grin grows wider. “Do not fear your safety, or theirs. …although with that great warhammer of yours, you are always at your best alone, yes?”

Despite the quiet mockery there’s clear hunger in that too; it is something he has heard but rarely in the lighter tones of a woman’s voice. This desire is for the challenge of it: pitting oneself against something stronger, something that will give true battle. Thor sets his teeth. “We come in parley.”

“So why would you then fear being outnumbered in her sanctum?” Her fingers are light upon the leather-wound haft of her favoured weapon. “One to accompany you, Odinson, or you shall see your brother not at all.”

“I could strike you all down here and now and take him.”

“You could try,” she grants, quite careless of the violent threat in both body and eye. “But it’s somewhat less simple than you believe it to be.”

It is almost an echo of Loki’s own likely reaction, right down to the light irony of the words. Whether she had intended to invoke such memory, Thor cannot know – but knowing his brother within, he must heed the wisdom of it. “Barton, come with me.”

Sif startles in her reflexive step forward. “What?”

But the mortal moves into place, wordless. Thor looks back. “If I am not back in an hour, burn this world to ash.” It is utterly without emotion, and is no warning but promise alone. “I would have nothing less for my brother’s funeral longboat.”

The handmaiden snorts. “Must all kings love their drama so?” she mutters, even as she turns and waves a hand casually forward. “Come, then.”

Barton keeps pace as they move into the tent. The air hangs heavy with incense, sweet and yet not cloying. But the scent of the sea moves just beneath it, invasive and ever-present. Campaign tent though this is there are pots of plants to line their approach, making it seem as if they are in the dense forests of this land; every branch seems to reach out for cloth and skin and armour, curious and probing both.

Deep at its heart two high-backed chairs have been set upon a dais. One is empty, the other taken. As they approach the figure rises in elegant sinusoid wave. And quite despite himself Thor must catch his breath, holding it in steady silence.

The self-made Vanir queen is possessed of a beauty that strikes hard at even one born and raised amongst the perfection of Asgard’s elite. She is not tall, but renders herself imposing by pure force of will instead. A slender woman, all shallow curve, she wears her hair in a loose tumble of blonde curls that cascades with almost childish glee down her slim back. Dark eyes latch onto his, watchful and waiting, like the universe opened wide and ready to swallow him whole. But when she tilts her head he thinks perhaps she is instead an ocean, poised to drown all those fool enough to trust her surface to keep them afloat.

“Odinson.”

He bows not, raising his chin high. “Kinslayer.”

The answering laugh is girlish, for all the smoky depth and weight of her speaking voice. The back of her hand rises, presses to lip as if to smother the sound there. And then she lowers it, shakes her head with a small tsk. “That is not my name.”

“But it is truth in the same fashion.”

Nerþuz shakes her head, the bells worked through her hair awakened to faint song. “It is not truth we need concern ourselves with now, I can assure you.” With their unconventional greetings given – but then, they are unconventional king and queen both – Nerþuz takes a step back, resumes her travelling throne. One leg crosses over the other, revealing a flat silver sandal; it begins a slow rise and fall as she leans forward with her chin cupped in one bare hand.

“So, where shall we begin?” she asks, and she seems so very young for a moment Thor quite has no idea what to say next. But then she smiles and the empty void of her eyes is enough to have Mjölnir flaring to echo his ugly demand.

“Where is my brother?”

And though nothing of her build or stance displays anything of a warrior and she has no-one by her side, not even her peculiar champion in the guise of Sigrdrífa, Nerþuz is utterly unmoved by the threat of enraged warrior-king and seiðr-wrought weapon. “Is that really how you wish to proceed?” she asks, one eyebrow arching high with a child’s surprise. “We are at war, and you have my ear alone. And yet all you wish to speak of is your _brother_?” Now she leans back in her chair, canted over one arm; she seems as pitying as she is bemused. “What king thinks of himself before his people?”

Mjölnir is a shriek in his head, but only a fierce hum audible to all in his hand. “Give him to me.”

The smile she chooses is as lovely as a summer morn. “Oh, it’s almost charming, isn’t it?” she says, almost to no-one at all; when she speaks next, her attention does focus upon Thor alone, hardening to accusation. “Your brother is not some mere instrument to be passed hand to hand, Odinson.”

“And yet you took him as if he were.”

“Did I?” One thick eyebrow has arched becomingly, though her smile is now something rather ugly indeed even as her eyes sparkle with vicious humour. “Let me ask him forward, and then we can ask him what he makes of that particular supposition.”

She turns, one hand shifting upon braceleted wrist; Thor pays her little attention. His heart aches already, jolting into fierce rapid beat.

And then his heart stops dead. Loki is not dressed in the loose silk shirt and rough-spun trousers of Midgard, but neither is he in the regalia of an Asgardian prince. He is become something new again, his lengthened hair pulled back from his face by a looping silver coronet of leaves and coils. It is brilliant against the darkness of his hair, rendering him beautiful in a fashion very nearly alien.

But it is what he wears upon the still-slim body that coils his stopped heart into a knot he does not think may ever be undone except by blade and blow. They are robes, but they are nothing of Asgard. And his stomach twists, heaves. He knows this regalia. It is not the original; Thor had seen for himself that back in the site of the fallen oracle, bloodied, stiff with spill and salted with sweat. But what Loki wears now is worked in the same fashion, though finer again still. The black shadows are worn so easily about the pale body beneath, one Thor has known so well as brother and lover alike. It is stitched again in his colours, gold and fierce green – the patterns, he knows now, worked in the swirling truth of his clan-markings as a Jötunn’s abandoned get.

“Brother,” he gasps, and Loki’s face is a frozen mask as he folds his hands together and shakes his head.

“I am no kin of yours.”

Thor rears back as if struck. “You are mine.”

His smile is such a shame, as delicate and sorrowing as the death of the first buds of spring. And then he looks to the queen, who extends one small hand with her lips pursed in joyous smile. With the easy grace of a courtier born Loki accepts her gift and presses his lips to the knuckles. Then he presses those to his own forehead, accepting the anointed favour of a crowned monarch. When she withdraws her small hand only then does he turn again, one eyebrow arched high.

“I am Loki,” he says, voice strong and light upon the charged air of the enclosed world in which they stand, “and I am free to choose my place and my purpose as I will.”

The proclamation is like thunderstrike, but it is not just Loki he thinks of now. His eyes drop, tongue thick and dry and wordless in his mouth. The growing weight of the child is hidden by the flow of his robe, this one who cannot speak for himself. Following Thor’s gaze, Loki’s hand moves, traces over it. “They do say possession is where the laws begin,” he muses, and Thor’s head jerks up as if his head is caught between the hands of one who has a mind to snap his neck clean through.

“Loki.” Foolishly, he even smiles; confusion is the cruellest blade of them all. “Brother, please. What is going on? They’ve taken you from Midgard, brought you here as prisoner—”

“My poor, foolish oaf of a king.” Tender, Loki takes his chair at the queen’s side, touches two fingers to his lips. “Do I look to be a prisoner, to you?” he asks, smiling over at her even as she gives him one back. “I am a guest. Of the Queen of the Vanir.”

“No.”

Then he looks back, this time with no apology at all. “Oh, yes, Thor.”

“But _why_?” It comes out as a shout, his hands fisted and Mjölnir a thrumming heavy weight at his hip. “Why would you throw in with the people who mistreated you so? Do you truly believe that I am unable to mend the damage they have done, to right the wrongs they have wrought?”

Loki’s face contorts into furious mask. “You call my child a _wrong_?”

“You know that I do not!” He must pause then, must try to rein in his fury before it gets the better of him; much as he will shout and rage at all others, such tantrums of temper have never worked upon the insubstantial shadow that has always been his watchful brother. And in a way he feels fractured, for Barton plays that role now, barely felt at his side as Thor stands before that same brother. He swallows hard, tries for persuasive when he knows perfectly well he will always be but student to such master. “Loki, listen to me: we will give our child a place on Asgard. Where he belongs.” The sincerity burns upon his lips. “Where _you_ belong.”

“I belong to no-one but myself.” And his hand rises, is touched upon the palm by the easy graceful fingertips of the Vanir queen. “And I give my allegiance to those who understand both who and what I am.”

“You are the second son of Asgard!”

“Oh, and that is the truth of it right there. No, Thor. _No_.” There is sudden vicious anger to it now, Loki leaning forward even over the growing curve of his body. “I am no kin of the Allfather, and certainly no kin of yours. Even when we all thought it to be true, whispers always said I was undeserving of the very blood running in my veins.” Now his voice rises with frustrated ire, the words sharp blade already slick with the blood of the one who wields its now-turned blade. “And did you ever pay my honour more than lip-service, oh elder brother and protector? How often did you laugh along with their mockery, or bring into question the use and skill of my seiðr and chosen style of battle?”

He feels very sick, foolish, a child who has wrought such damage that not even his almighty father might not undo. “Loki, whatever wrongs I have done you—”

“ _Stop_.” His voice is that of a teacher’s, patience quite run out with a student who might never be taught. “Are you truly fool enough to not realise it?”

“Realise _what_?” he shouts, frustration quite out of his control. His brother’s nod is all satisfaction, as if he could have expected nothing else.

“This is simply how it has always been meant to be.”

“What are you talking about?”

Loki’s lips press tight together, sudden, as if caught upon a lie he does not wish to tell after all. Then they relax, and his words are ice-light. “Tell me, Thor: who wished for the hunt?”

At first it makes no sense to his mind at all. When he at last takes his brother’s meaning, it still is not clear to him. “The hunt?”

“That brought us to Vanaheimr,” he says, impatient. “I asked you once, and you could not answer.”

It has never seemed important, for all Loki had mentioned it before. In this moment Thor wracks his brain again, circumstance giving him answer enough at last. “Fandral,” he says, finally. “It was Fandral, wasn’t it? He and Volstagg had been drinking, in a tavern on the edge of Svartálfaheimr. Volstagg had been deep in an affair with a honey-roast hog, and he’d met a comely lass with a tongue filled with tales even when it wrapped about his manhood.”

And the tongue upon Loki’s lower lip is a slick, sickening realisation. “She told him of a legend, yes. And of how she wanted the pelt upon its mighty back.” And Loki laughs, head thrown back, throat working; when he looks back, his eyes are green hard amusement. “And he was quite smitten, for she wouldn’t give him her maidenhead though she took his seed willingly enough. And you were bored, and fancy though it seemed…”

“No.”

Loki grins. “I am quite good at shifting my shapes…but then you already know as much, do you not?” And Thor remembers the weight of bodies either side of him, crushing now instead of cushioning, and Loki mouth curls. “And my tongue is talented and true in all manner of things, yes?”

“ _No_.”

Flapping one hand, Loki’s voice goes very hard. “Don’t fret yourself so, Thor – no matter what boasts he might have made of his lovely mystery maiden, I didn’t let _him_ have me. Even I was not willing to go so far. There was nothing he could give me that I would actually have wanted.” And with head tilted, his voice drops to low whisper. “Only one had what I truly needed, though as we worked you towards the state we needed, as we prepared the chamber for the ceremony, we did…play at experimentation, somewhat.”

He wishes suddenly to drop to his knees and vomit until all this sickness leaves him hollow and dry. “Stop with these lies, brother.”

But Loki is relentless. “I was playing a role, the half-obedient prisoner. They deserved some recompense for what they did.” Leaning back in the chair, Loki swings one leg over the other and begins a slow tap upon the cushioned arm; the queen gives him an amused look, but Loki has but eyes for Thor alone as he gives this crushing truth. “I took them all, you know. Not just the leader, though he was the only one who knew the truth of the mummery.” His hips shift as if in memory, and his smile turns indolent. “ _I had them all, brother mine_. Every single one, paving the path for your cock when the stars were aligned and all was prepared.”

“But you killed them.” Numb, even as his groin stirs and his blood rises to rage against the long since dead. “You bound your soul to mine, and we brought down Mjölnir together. You _killed_ them, you cannot have been in league with them, they would not have let you…”

“All decent sorcery requires a sacrifice.” His hand caresses the swell of his belly, pushed higher by the cant of his restless hips. “And our child is here to tear entire realms asunder. He will be born in blood, he will be raised to battle. Is it therefore not only fitting that he should be conceived in death? Life wrought begun by the ending of others?”

Thor’s great body is given over to sway, like the World Tree rocked to its very roots. “This was all but a game to you?”

“I would hardly call it a _game_ , given the stakes,” he says, distasteful. “But yes. It’s an apt enough metaphor, I suppose – if it gets it through your thick skull.” The caressing fingers skirt dangerously close to the crux of his own thighs, and Thor draws audible breath; Loki’s grin is cruel. “I needed your seed, Thor. And I needed your faith in giving it over to my fertile womb.”

“ _Why would you do this?_ ”

His shouts rocks the ground itself, for all Thor is named king of Asgard and not Vanaheimr. But Loki is unconcerned, eyes cold from upon the lesser throne he has taken at the side of the self-made queen. “Because you are your father’s son, and the Borrson is the creature who took me from my place and made of me something I never was.”

_(“Because of the differences not even his perpetual glamour could ever hope to mask, Loki has danced the fine edge of hating you his entire life.”)_

His father’s words shudder through him like an ill-tempered blade. “I know that you thought they thought little of you, but are you truly telling me you gave up Asgard for petty jealousy of order of birth?”

Loki’s face twists, the snarl of some creature not Aesir by any stretch of the imagination – rather, a spirit of malice and fury both. “ _Fool_ ,” he hisses, eyes serpentine narrow, body a crushing curve as he leans forward, knuckles white where hands grip tight the arms of his chosen chair. “I gave up Asgard because Asgard was never mine! I am the son of a frost giant, and even when ignorant of that I would never have sat upon the throne of Asgard except by pity or catastrophic circumstance.”

Thor cannot speak through numb lips, his heart aching with the memory of Loki upon him upon golden shining Hliðskjálf; surely upon the all-seeing he could not have been so blind. “You never knew your heritage,” he forces out. “You could not have chosen this, you didn’t even know what you were!”

Scorn burns like the acid dripping from his lips. “Did I not?”

“Father told us, after! I saw you! I was with you! I took you, to my room and to my bed…Loki.” His harsh breathing struggles against the fury and frustration and fear braided into a cord; it wraps about his throat and pulls tighter with every word. “Loki, you could not have faked _that_.”

His voice breaks upon the last word. Loki but shakes his head, pitying, leaning back once more. “I am a liar, raised by liars.” His chin moves high, the silver crown in his dark hair catching the light with laughing edge. “What makes you believe I could not have lied my life away then, considering how I did it every day otherwise?”

But Thor cannot believe it. He remembers it too well: the betrayal that drove Loki to his knees, and then to fitful shout. But then…his brother has always been volatile in a way most never knew. So few people ever see Loki in laughter, in tears, in true anger. Thor has seen Loki take note of a jest made by Thor at table, and then laugh about it only when they were alone together in their chambers.

_How long has he held this fury inside him?_

“But I love you,” Thor whispers, almost bewildered, and Loki only shrugs.

“You love an illusion, a shadow, a creature who never existed.” He passes his hand over his face as if removing a mask. “Loki Odinson, second prince of Asgard, is but a lie.”

“He is not.”

And he goes on, as if Thor had never spoken. “And I am Loki Liesmith, Loki the Silvertongue, Loki the Crawling Chaos.” When he reclines again, it is with the certainty of one fit to weave his own future no matter what pattern the Norns might have devised otherwise. “And I shall be the one to bring down the House of Odin.”

“No.” Thor cannot take Mjölnir, not even now. “No, you cannot do this.”

“Why not?” Bitter again, Loki hisses each word. “I was never allowed to keep my children as even the second Prince of Asgard. Why should it be any different, when I am but whored to the throne of the king? I would rather have it my way. In this, I steal that of even the favoured son. He shall be the first born, and through him I shall remake the world.”

“ _We_ could have remade it!”

“No.” Loki tosses his head, false crown ablaze in false light. “You are your father’s son,” he says, again. “You could promise me the world, but in the end you would give me up. You would surrender me and we both know it. I am but the Allfather’s failed assurance, good enough neither as brother or consort to his only son.” He is very cold in accepting a truth of which Thor can barely conceive. “And so I make my own way.”

And as Loki stands tall, garbed in the shadows of where this had all begun, he does not stand long alone. Nerþuz flows to her feet, her hair golden waves in full rush of incoming tide. “And we have given him the path he wishes to walk,” she says, sweet voice carrying across the room in currents and eddies that threaten to drown all caught within them. Her hand is very light where it rests upon his wrist. “And so Loki stands at the side of a queen, rather than slaved to a king.”

And Thor cannot help but smile, his disbelief as strong as his agony. “Tell me then, Queen and Kinslayer of the Vanir – what makes you think such a serpent shall not one day betray you, too?”

She but smiles, as much a secret as the strength coiled in her small body. It is Loki who answers. But then, this battle has always been between them. From the moment their father had both named them born to be kings, perhaps this had been as inevitable as the coming together of their bodies. “Because they know the value of my child,” he says, simple in a way that is utterly at odds for the coiled mystery Thor has always known his brother to be. “They have seen the future, and it is what they wish for.” His hand is soft upon the keeping-place of said future. “And I wish for it, too.”

And Thor chokes upon it. “You fool, what have you _done_?”

“Everything I always wanted.” Delicately removing his hand from beneath the touch of the watchful queen, who knows enough to see she is but audience to this tragedy, Loki descends the dais, comes to stand before his once-brother. “Go back to your army, Odinson. And if you have any sense, you shall take them back to Asgard and let the worlds turn as they will,” he advises, very nearly kind. “It will be seasons before my child comes to his own. Enjoy the last summer before the winter comes, the late golden afternoon before twilight.” And when he sighs at his brother’s confusion, it is the memory of a thousand moments of childhood. “That is my gift to you, for the love I once bore the Aesir stormborn the One-Eye had me name _brother_.”

Cold as the words leave him Thor speaks with ease, as conversational as he might be over wine and cheese. “And what if I do not take my army, and turn them around? What if I bring them down upon you both, kinslayer and traitor alike? What shall you do to stop me then?”

Loki’s answering smile is as sweet as any he might have worn as a child, suggesting a newfound secret place where they might play together alone. “I did go to Midgard for a reason.”

Barton draws a sharp sudden breath at his side, and Loki nods as if approving the response of a well-trained hound.

“The tesseract cannot be moved, save by any will but the Allfather’s,” he muses, and though his tone is speculative there’s a malicious mischief to his eyes when he adds: “But it _can_ be coaxed to fresh purpose. If one knows how best to touch it where it longs for it most.”

Thor’s eyes cannot help but follow the playful flutter of Loki’s long fingers upon lower lip, tight with the memory of a thousand touches from such. “What fool thing have you done now?”

When he laughs, it feels fit to break the worlds apart. “If you try to take the tesseract from Midgard, it will implode, taking that entire little realm with it.” Leaning forward, eyes alight with intrigue and fierce fascination, Loki grins wide about the challenge. “Can _you_ take that upon your conscience?”

For a fleeting moment he wonders if he can. Then it comes, crushing and inevitable: the shame of knowing the truth of that, and of himself. The nine realms are balanced, three and three and three. Not one can be removed without disturbing another. Loki knows that, and likely far better than Thor himself. But then Thor thinks now perhaps he knows Loki not at all, that light sheen of madness that pokes through the fine ivory mask of his features.

“You would not dare.”

He blinks. “Wouldn’t I?”

“It would undermine Yggdrasil itself!”

And Loki’s shrug is appalling in its nonchalance. “Indeed it might.”

From very young Thor had learned to raise his voice when wanting to be heard, rather than searching for better words. It is against all instinct to lower his voice, eyes narrowed when he speaks next. “You do not know what that might do. And then…what of Jörmungandr?”

“No, I do not know exactly what would befall that little mortal realm.” He sounds almost mournful, leaning back in the gifted chair at the queen’s side with one hand thoughtful over the growing swell of his belly. “But perhaps I would just like to see what would happen. If I did.” And the glint of his eye grows stronger yet, as his fingers begin easy stroke. “And Jormungandr is and always has been little more than a pet, an experiment, of a sort. It is the child I have taken from you that is the one that matters.”

“You cannot—”

“My child is the one who shall bring down Asgard, Thor. But I won’t object to a little chaos and catastrophe before then.”

Mjölnir feels then to stir herself, restless in his hand. As if drawn by her song Loki draws even closer to Thor’s still tall form. One hand rests upon his shoulder, palm pressed to the runed bracteate that holds cape to breastplate. When he smiles, and it is sadness and scorn alike.

“Will you miss me then, brother?” He almost croons those words, soft and low, like the pressure of his breath as he leans close. “I shan’t miss you, I think. I’ve quite perfected the simulacrum, you see. All that research you aided me in, you know.” And his hand moves over his brother’s shallow-breath chest, knowing of the skin beneath, head tilting as eyes trace that well-known path. “Whenever I want a good hard fucking, I’ll have you just the way I want you.”

Temper twists his fingers tight about Mjölnir’s haft, but in his heart he aches for the filth upon his brother’s lips. It cannot be true. Loki lies, it is what he was both born and fashioned to. But then perhaps that is the truth of this, Loki released from the destiny given him. “So it was all just a cruel game, to you,” he says, dull. “Everything between us, words and actions both.”

The flat question brings forth a low chuckle, a soft answer. “But then isn’t life itself the cruellest game of them all?” He should not allow this, he knows that, but still Thor cannot move as Loki’s hand drifts up, fingers curling about the line of his jaw, palm pressed to the rasp of bearded chin. “But you _were_ good, brother. So very, very good. …and I know I was good for you. I will carry those screams in my heart forever.” But even as his body shivers he takes a step back, chin held high. “But I’m not yours. I never was.”

Thor cannot follow. Loki has long known how to walk secret paths not meant for feet such as his. And as if plucking that thought from his head Loki raises one hand, waves it indolently towards the exit only he can see.

“Don’t look so hangdog, oaf. You can always go slake your deviancy elsewhere. I’m sure Sif won’t mind if you shriek my name once or twice in her bed, she’s always had _such_ a yen for you.” Something deeply unkind flashes in his eyes then, lips curled like a hound scenting dirty blood. “Or perhaps you could explore further that little mortal woman who so caught your eye on Midgard. You remember her, yes? The way she smiled at you? She’d take it, I’m sure, whatever scraps of affection you would toss her. Maybe you could spread her thighs and rut her raw – you, great hulking thing, and her so tiny and fragile.” Now he leans close again, merely to whisper into his ear, honeyed poison dripped like acid. “Believe me, brother, her taste is _quite_ delicious.”

Reflex reigns over sense, Thor’s palm pressed to shoulder to shoves him roughly back. Loki’s laugh curves in the fashion of the hand that moves about his belly, the tip of his tongue tracing along one lip. “Ooh, careful – you never did know your strength.” The long fingers splay outward, web enclosing the precious gift inside. “And no matter my own origins, brother or no, the babe _is_ of your blood. Surely even you would not condemn your own child, simply for the one who bears him.”

Thor closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. It calms only his words, and not the red haze of the mind that births him. “Loki. If you do this, you will twist him to darkness and hate.”

“He was always to be born to it. He was conceived in blood, taking hold in the wake of death.” He pauses, and sounds nearly sorrowing when he says with soft conviction: “It really is inevitable.”

It is that which breaks his heart, even as it hardens. Thor opens his eyes, face schooled to utter blankness as he looks upon the false beauty of his brother’s longest-held mask. “Nothing is set in stone.”

“Ah, but then the stones of Urðr have not moved since time immemorial, and her waters are clear and true as the inevitability of fate itself.” Both hands lay upon his swollen belly now, and he shakes his head. “It is done, Odinson. Go back to your warriors, make your choice as I have made mine.”

“You have no idea what you have done.”

The hoarseness just makes him smile. “And take _him_ with you, I have no need of that one now.” Barton shifts, a scarce movement, but Loki has eyes only for the stone golem that had once been his brother. “Send him as a messenger to his own crawling insect horde of a people, let them know that there are beings far greater than them in the realms beyond.”

“Loki.”

He blinks, only once. “Thor.” Then his eyes flick to the mortal, one eyebrow rising in a fashion strangely conversational. “ _Go_ , Barton. I release your jess, I take your hood. Fly away home, little hawk.”

The archer remains still, watchful. But then this is not his battleground, and Thor has already learned it is his place to watch, to gather information for others to disseminate though in truth he is quicker at such than most people could hope to be. But Thor can only stare at the mystery no man nor god could ever hope to unravel.

“Loki.” It is but blind hope, the foolish plea of a child. “Forget this madness.”

The blink is as innocent as any he had employed to aid their escape from retribution for childhood misadventure. “Madness?”

“ _Come home_.”

He snorts, every movement easy as he comes forward, sets cool palm against Thor’s heated cheek. “Yet your father took me from my home years ago, Thor. He made it so I could never return there, shackled to his own golden throne.” Again, he sounds almost tender, though his eyes are very cold when he leans forward and murmurs against stilled lips: “ _I was no son, I was but a tool he had not stomach enough to wield_.”

And the concealed blade slides home, flesh sudden welcome sheath. Thor would double forward, but Loki’s grip is a tender trap, holding him tight, forcing him upright. So like him, always the one mindful of his brother’s dignity as the future king of Asgard where Thor would forget it in favour of glory and the earthy delight of blood and sweat and battle.

“Loki.” His hands grasp about his upper arms in fierce disbelief, and though he stares he is utterly blinded by shock. “ _Loki_.”

The blade does not move, held in place by Loki’s strong knowing hand. “Just because I loved you, it does not mean I cannot hurt you, brother,” he says, gentle as he presses their cheeks together. “And I will as needs must. But I don’t wish to kill you, and not just because you are the father of my salvation.”

Thor stares at the floor that suddenly feels very far away. The taste of bile, and blood, bubbles in the back of his throat. He has bitten through his lip, and he can feel the crawl of Loki’s eyes across it. As if he wishes a taste.

“I told a lie, as it turns out,” he muses. And he releases the blade, pulls free of Thor’s grip, drops low as he faces him once more. The clever hand cups his balls, closes sudden and painful tight. “I should like another bastard from you, I think,” he says with vague eyes fixed somewhere far away, dreamer walking the scorched plains of his brother’s waking nightmare. “In fact, an army of them would be heaven – marching across the sky to bring it down like the shroud of Ragnarök, covering all those fool enough to underestimate Loki.”

“No.”

“No?” Loki focuses upon him again then, lips a playful curve almost as full as his abdomen; beneath his touch, Thor’s own shaft begins a swelling stir. “My silver-iron is in you, and still you rouse to my touch?”

His cheeks fill with the same blood, shame and fury rendering him wordless. And Loki, so accustomed to his brother, can only laugh as he presses one finger to his bloodied lip.

“The Allfather never should have crowned you. You are no worthy king of Asgard. In the end you’re just as low a creature as I.” The words drive deeper than the shallow, narrow blade, and Loki smiles as he twists. “ _But I don’t mind_. Our child will be the most beautiful of base things – warrior without noble shackle, sorcerer unbridled by your foolish ideas of honour and appropriate place.”

Thor yanks back, free of his touch, hands fisted at his sides. “This is your last chance,” he grits out, the words ice water down his spine. “Walk out of this place at my side. Come back to Asgard. Do not do this.”

He raises palms to shoulders, face mirror of his helpless shrug. “But it is already done.” And though he leans forward to press a kiss upon his lips, the taste of the blood is but prelude to the violent shove that forces Thor to stumble back, the blade still in his flesh. “Now get out.”

For all the growing swell of child within him, in the robes Loki is all slender edge, a crooked blade standing upon the dais. This is the false shadow of the brother Thor had known, Thor had _loved_. And the mockery of those cold eyes breaks something deep in his heart. A snarl rips from his lips before he can even think of what he might wish to say, because there is nothing left to say. His hand closes over the blade, slave to the desire to rip it out and drive it deep into that treacherous heart, to slit the belly and wrench out the child before it is poisoned further by the madness of the one who carries it, precious loved treacherous lying—

A hand, callused and sure, closes over his fingers. “ _No_.”

He could break every digit with a flex of his own. But he does not; he has thought enough left to his mind to turn his attention to the sound’s source. Despite that he still feels strong the urge to take Mjölnir and split the skull of the fragile-boned fool of a mortal. But Barton stares up at him, face set in hard line, callused fingers hard yet over his own.

“Leave it.” He blinks, just once, the scarcest flicker of fear in the face of the half-maddened god he seeks to tame with little more than word. “It’ll do more damage to pull it out than just leave it until we can get something to patch it up with.”

He almost wants to laugh. “Are you _mad_?”

“No. But I’m starting to wish I was.” He drops his hand then, spine as straight and as sure as any lord standing at the side of his liege. “We’re leaving.”

Loki’s high laugh ricochets from every corner like the scattered images of a fractured mirror. “Oh, and how the mighty fall,” he mocks, light and easy upon his liar’s chair. “See the King of Asgard, led about by the nose by a mere mortal!”

Barton pays him no heed, eyes for Thor alone. “So let’s go.”

Said mortal is more than a head shorter than him, but her bears Thor’s much greater weight with a surprising strength. It is a force of will Thor has seen but rarely even amongst the elite warrior-born of Asgard herself. Never will he underestimate their mettle again he thinks in hazy shock, and the press of the metal in his side digs with each step. But then it has struck nothing vital. Barton had been correct to say there would be more risk of blood loss should he pull it free.

 _But then it is not my blood loss that was in question._ Shaking even as he holds his head high, Thor knows at last the true horror of what has just happened. Loki’s lies and vicious truths are not even the worst of it – no, the worst it was that urge to dismember his brother, beloved and betrayer both. Hate never comes so strong when it is born of the ashes of violent love.

When they step out of the tent even the shrouded sun of the Vanaheimr sky is harsh against his eyes. Barton stays close though he no longer supports him visibly at all; fortunately the others know to stand back, only Sif stepping close. Her sharp eyes note first the lack of Loki, and then the only half-casual press of Thor’s hand over the blade.

“What happened in there?”

“Long story,” Barton says, clipped and not cowed in the slightest by her blazing eyes. _But then_ , Thor supposes, _he seems to have had practise enough in such dealings given his acquaintance with the fair and furious Agent Romanov_. Yet Barton is far from home and thoughts of it alike when he looks to Thor now, face set in hard line. “We need to get back to the camp, sir.”

Sif’s mouth thins. “Where is Loki?”

“Longer story.” The man’s voice remains inflexible and yet nothing confrontational as he adds: “Trust me, Lady Sif, we need to get your king back to his tent before we do a sweet goddamn.”

The ignominy of a mortal speaking for an anointed Aesir king ought to hurt more than this. But he is an ache of betrayal from heart outward and the irony bubbles unspoken in his throat, like the high delight of Loki’s laughter but moments ago.

Thor manages to keep his spine straight and his head high as they return to their escort. But as soon as he is before his horse, he grits his teeth and goes to his saddlebag. Barton had had a point, but he will not swing himself upon a horse with a blade in his flesh. Having retrieved a wound pad he finally pulls it free; by reflex his fingers open, dropping it to the ground without so much as a single glance. Barton’s own cursory look is but a moment’s odd curiosity before he bends just low enough to pick it up. On the other hand, Týr’s eyes have always been sharp, and fix in hot query upon his monarch’s paled skin.

“What happened in there?”

“We shall speak of it behind our own lines.” The piercing pressure of where the damned blade had been is harsh yet, though it is nothing compared to the hollow of where his heart ought to be. But his whole body throbs with the beat of it, rendering it more invisible than absent. But perhaps then it was not even his heart that had been taken. It is more that his soul had been severed in twain, and when the other half had been loosed it had then turned upon him like a cobra.

Blood seeps through the pad pressed to it within a moment; despite his armour, his brother had known exactly where to aim the blade to have it go deepest without true mortal injury. As he takes another, it aches with fierce memory of those cold eyes on his own, and he spurs his horse to heedless gallop. But Thor holds his head high when he dismounts safe at the heart of their camp, both hands upon his hips as he turns to face the multitude already beginning to gather.

“There will be a council called in regards to our next movements,” he says, and despite exhaustion and the disquiet of soul his voice carries with the strength of thunder across what feels the entire camp. “Gather all the commanders not active in the field and bring them to me.”

Sif’s voice is low in his ear. “Thor, you are injured.”

He drops his eyes to her, hard, and she actually looks startled. “There’s time enough while they’re gathering to attend to it.” He raises a hand to stall further protest, and to halt the approach of half a dozen others. “For the meantime, I will see no others – but Barton, Sif: both of you, come with me.”

Once inside the tent he sends his pale-faced page to a healer, though one of the scouts sent ahead has already made the request. It is but moments before Þjálfi returns, the stone wrapped in silk and cupped warm between his palms. Thor sits upon the bed, takes it, and sends him away again to aid other pages in fetching wine and water for the impromptu Þing in the king’s tent. Barton and Sif take their places across from him. There’s no need to wave back any assistance; somehow even the mortal has knowledge enough to let him tend to himself. Still Thor winces as he pries apart the split armour enough to sprinkle the crushed dust into it, allowing it to heal.

But it will scar, for all his quickness of cure. Not physically, perhaps. But this has left a mark on him that can only fester further with time, knowing his brother has slipped into such madness even with his brother’s love to hold him to the truth.

The council is coming, and he will have to tell them that the war is not only against the Vanir, but the Jötunn half-breed once known only as the second prince of Asgard. Thor fights best when the odds are high, when there is a challenge, when things stretch him to the very limits of even his divine capabilities. But this is not his body that is so sorely, delightfully tested. This is his spirit shredded by cruelty and circumstance. And though one of the two with him here is scarcely more than a stranger Thor cannot help but bend forward, head in his hands, half-healed wound burning as he buries his head in his hands.

 _I cannot kill you brother. Much as my blood rises, I…no killing blow could ever come from my hand. But in telling of what you have done I condemn you to death…and the babe with you_.

“Thor.”

Sif’s voice is half-plea, half-command. But she does not come close. It is the mortal who sighs, drops into a seat even in the presence of a king. The palm of one hand presses to his forehead with deep pressure, his eyes tightly closed.

“I have _never_ seen anything…I can’t even. Your brother is one _bastard_ of a good liar.”

Thor’s head snaps up, his entire body poised for fight. “What?”

Barton’s only head rises, a dog startled from worrying at a bone. “What?” he says, startled echo. Then he goes very tense, very still. “Aw, hell – you didn’t realise, did you.”

“What nonsense are you speaking of?”

“Oh, holy shit.” The archer is incredulous now, leaning forward with hands pressed tight together between his knees. “You really didn’t know that your brother, that whole time? _Was lying his ass off_.”

Sif’s heavy stare feels fit enough to drive them both into a pauper’s grave. “What is he talking about?” Her eyes drop to where the healing stone still itches its powder and power beneath his skin, and her voice is cold query. “Thor, exactly who did this to you?”

“Loki.”

“ _Loki_?” For all her surprise, it is clear she’d known from the beginning. Had anyone else laid hands upon the King of Asgard, there would have been no exit made. “Thor, why in the Norns’ name would he stab you?”

“Because he’s gone over to the Vanir.”

“He hasn’t,” Barton immediately objects, but Sif’s shout half-drowns him out.

“He did _what_?”

Now Barton shakes his head, leans back, eyes rolled to the ceiling and looking quite like he’d rather be anywhere but here. Then he pinches his nose, eyes narrowing though he looks at neither of them. “Loki told his brother that he did all this to get a bastard off him. One that he could then use to bring down the House of Odin and bring about Ragnarök both.”

Sif looks between them, disbelieving even given how well she knows Loki. But her gaze fixes upon Thor in the end. “A bastard?” Voiced as a question though it is, her quick mind answers it but a moment later. “He’s _with child_?” He does not answer, but it is enough for her; she is set to pacing, long ponytail whipping about her pale furious faces with every quick turn she makes. “Thor, what is going on?”

“Not what I understand it to be, in the words of the archer.”

“Yeah, I think you’re missing the point of his little play in there.” Again he rubs his hand over the sweat and blood-wrought mess of his short hair, the strong muscles of forearm tense as the air between them. “Trust me. He was lying to you.”

“He _stabbed_ me!”

Thor knows he sounds petulant, almost like a child; Barton in turn becomes incredulous. “Yeah, for good reason. If you’d just—”

“I’ve known him for a thousand years, and you for hardly more than the turn of your little blue moon. What makes you believe you understand him and his mind where I do not?”

“Well, I’m not hopelessly in love with him, for one thing.”

The wry words drive Thor to temporary silence. Then he swallows hard, shakes his head. “But love is faith,” he says, bitter. “Surely if my love were so noble a thing, I would trust him unto utter foolishness.”

He doesn’t deny it; his shrug instead seems to sit somewhere strong upon that fence. “Maybe. But then – God of Mischief and Lies, yeah?” Thor’s jaw tightens, but Barton still has that almost preternatural calm to him as he frowns deep. “Besides, this whole thing’s buggered all to hell anyway, if you ask me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m assuming from all the subterfuge and balancing on wire tricks going on around here that you’re not supposed to be doing any of this in the first place.” Barton pauses a moment, as if testing the tension of his bowstring. Then, reckless, he lets the arrow fly. “So maybe you’re just thinking this was all inevitable. That maybe you deserved it. For not being able to protect him.” He blinks, three times fast, as if forcing himself to make the jump when he doesn’t know if anything waits to catch him. “From his past. From your father. From the Vanir. From _yourself_.”

The red haze of fury descends like storm. Looming over him, Mjölnir shrieking, he feels Sif’s strong hands upon his arms and only vaguely hears her shout in his ear. But what stays the killing blow is Barton himself, silent and still, staring up at him without word nor any motion. But then he needs neither, for upon the upturned palm rests Loki’s dagger.

“He gave me half of one of these, remember? To give to you.” There’s a faint curve of irony to his words if not his lips when he adds: “This is the half he gave you himself.”

The wound in his side, healing as it is, gives a sharp throb at the sight of his blood dried upon its edge. When he speaks, his voice is a ragged wound. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s the same blade. But it’s different.” Thor stares blankly and Barton gives a small shake, just enough to shift it light upon his skin. “I can’t read this. I couldn’t read the other one either. But even I can see they’re different, for all they’re from opposite sides of the same dagger”

His brother did say the archer had sharp eyes – for when Thor looks to the curved arching runes upon its body, he knows it to be true. Though he’d known somewhat of the charms worked into Loki’s usual daggers, these he can read no more than the archer; it is an ancient tongue, more so than even Asgard herself. His father would know it, Thor is certain. It is from the times long since vanished to dim memory, when all life had been but chaos and chance. These are the ancient sounds and shapes of before the ordering of the World Tree into nine realms, three above, three below, three balanced between. Order from anarchy, his father’s perfect vision of a universe made perfect and true.

His lips are dry when they form sound. “It likely means nothing.”

“Do you really think anything your brother does could mean nothing?” Barton gives a quick flick of one wrist, catches the blade deft between fingers and thumb. “Here, though, have my guess.”

“Your guess?”

And as Thor stares at the proffered handle Barton nods. “He’s just given you the key to the tesseract.”

Thor does not take it, merely goes very still. But Sif’s sharp eyes have fixed upon the archer, who turns to her with grim purpose. “He said that it’s been locked to its place upon Midgard. And that it’s set to blow if someone tries to move it.” He gives the dagger a faint shake. “And I’d bet my ass that that’s the equivalent of a magic access code.”

Even as cruel hope flares bright, Thor stares cold fury upon the archer. “Why would you trust him?”

His shrug is well-met by the eyes that never leave his. “You remember that lovely little falconry metaphor he used?” And there’s a hint of resentment about his smile while Thor gives tight nod. “He meant that, the arrogant bastard, every damn word. Whether I wanted it or not, this is what he trained me for.”

“You believe _this_ is why he chose you?”

“I’m thinking so.” And again, he sounds almost bitter. “I’ve got a clear line of sight on this one. I’m up in my eyrie, watching everything. I’m detached. I’m not emotionally involved. He wanted me here because he knew you’d act before you thought.”

Sif is still as a blade sheathed only to give the killing blow more force with which to strike. “How do we know that he is not Loki’s thrall in this?”

“And you are not so removed,” Thor must add. “Your realm is held hostage by my brother’s word.”

“True.” But Barton does not drop his eyes. “And you don’t have to believe me. Loki could’ve trained me to be the good cop as much as the voice of reason in all this.”

“So why should we believe you?”

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, actually, but – love. Hope.” And indeed he almost laughs. “I’ve never been one for the politics of things. I have a handler, and he points me in the direction I need to go. But I _do_ see things for myself. More than they realise, sometimes.” And now his face is very hard. “I’ll make my own calls when I need to. And this is my call now.”

“And what call is that?”

“Your brother is where he needs to be. And now you need to go to where he needs you to be, so that you can be together the way you obviously want.”

In the silence that falls, it is Sif he shifts first, her voice low reason. “Thor, this is madness beyond imagining.”

He closes his eyes against that truth. The warmth of the blade is a brand against his callused palm, despite the fact his blood has long cooled upon its iron. “Get me the Lady Snotra.”

When he opens his eyes, he sees near-comical confusion upon Sif’s fine features. “ _Snotra_?”

“She could read this.” His voice has turned hard, every syllable carrying the command of a monarch. “Delay the council, this will not take long.”

With hand pressed in fist over heart, Sif takes her leave. Though silence again falls in her absence, Barton seems quite accustomed to it, his hands thoughtful over the Asgardian bow given over from the armoury. Jealousy rears an ugly head as Thor watches him in turn: this mortal, whom Loki had given over knowledge of the child…and possibly then a kind of trust in what might or might not be a game dangerous not only to his own life, but that of his child. And Thor is not fool enough to believe that Loki would ever believe anything worth the sacrificed safety of his own child.

_So maybe he **was** lying, you fool. You were so blinded by jealousy and his idiot words to not hear the truth of it…because whatever Jörmungandr truly is, he is Loki’s son. Loki would never harm Midgard, not so long as his child is banished there by the Allfather’s word._

Heartsick and silent, it seems age before she comes to him: the lady of wisdom, with long braids piled atop her head and her rich curves encased in light mail. She had come with the army as an advisor, given the sorcerous strength of the Vanir. To Thor’s knowledge she had even been upon the field, but her hands are soft and clean of all blood as she takes the blade he wordlessly offers. She asks no question, knowing of the reasons why her king might summon her. Thor holds his own silence, wishing to lead her nowhere in her answers.

After a moment it becomes obvious Snotra hums as she goes about her examination, a half-familiar tune Thor recognises vaguely from young years at his mother’s weaving knee. And then her eyes widen and any illusion of safety is gone in the strangled silence.

When he speaks, his voice feels an out of tune instrument. “What is it?”

She sets it down, and though she draws her hands back with a reverence bordering on fear, she does not raise her eyes. “Ancient magic,” she murmurs, and her eyebrows dig tight upon one another, her plump lips thinned. “It is the tellings of a binding spell, of a sort, but…” The braids tremble upon her head when it snaps up, eyes narrowed. “You had this from your brother?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes move back, something between horror and deep amused respect. “And under their noses, too,” she murmurs, and Thor wishes he could share her sudden hope. But then, she does not know of the hideous choice Loki has made.

“But it acts to _bind_ something?” he asks instead, seeking confirmation where it is likely unneeded. “It doesn’t reverse it?”

“It is the workings of a binding spell, yes.” Pushing at one loosed braid, she gives him a knowing look; she has picked up on her king’s lack of pleasure in her words. “It is something far beyond me, I fear, spelled out though it is.”

But Thor has already turned from Snotra, his accusation harsher than warranted as he meets the steady gaze of the archer. “So it seems that Loki’s _gift_ is not what you thought it.”

Barton’s shoulders move up, down. “Well, the magic thing beats the hell out of me, sure – but if you were wanting to undo something, seems to me it might help to have the instruction manual as to how it was made in the first place.”

Snotra gives Thor a sharp look. “Your brother is _bound_?”

There are a thousand questions and more contained in that singular, but Thor has answers for not a one of them. “By his own web, perhaps,” he says, and feels as if his head might split itself down the middle. Taking a heavy seat, he presses palm to temple and grimaces. “So then: what am I to do now? My council is coming and I know not whether my own brother is friend or foe, and I have an army poised upon the brink of war—”

“ _Thor_.” The tent’s flap has been all but torn open, all bodies within tensed by training and instinct alike. But the intruder is familiar, for all the sweat-sheened hair fallen into his eyes and the disarray of his clothing. Fandral clutches at the nearest pole, panting, wild. “Thor, it is a message from the Queen Regent.”

And from behind him they come, said message brought by Huginn and Muninn both. The birds settle upon his shoulders, the parchment light in his hand. But as he opens it, his hands still, and despite their weight it is as if a mantle he had not been ready to bear upon those shoulders has been lifted sudden and strange away. Frigga’s message is short, not curt – but still, it changes everything again.

_My son, your father wishes a word._


	11. Which An Age Of Prudence Can Never Retract

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, I have my breakdown about the next part of this -- but I think I just keep having this fits because I've been writing for so long. The longer I work at something, the less confident I tend to become in its worth. But I'm being surprisingly _stubborn_ here, because I kind of desperately want to get to the end of all this.
> 
> And so, thank you so so much to everyone still out there and reading. Every comment, every kudos, every bookmark...you really cannot know how much it means to think, even for the fleeting moment that is all my terrible brain will permit me, that my words might be something more than just wild flailing at the keyboard...
> 
> Thank you.
> 
> And just for posterity, I keep listening to Anna Coddington's [_Underneath The Stars_](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MN7-icjABFQ) as I write this fic. It's just...so lovely, in so many ways. 
> 
>  
> 
> _Looking out, it draws me in_  
>  _I watch the planets rise, then explode again_  
>  The sun was in my eyes, and I stared straight back  
> It will take more than the universe  
> To burn what we have  
> And I for one will not have that 
> 
> I really am working towards a happy ending to all this. I even have a good idea of how that might happen. Now, if Loki would just stop pulling shit on me when I least expect it...
> 
> Also, the glove kink. It had to happen sooner or later. ~~THEY KNOW WHO THEY ARE.~~

It has been many a year since a mortal last came to Asgard. Considering the circumstances Thor thinks gauging a reaction to his beloved home should be the last thing on his mind, and yet still cannot help but look to Barton when they exit the observatory and step upon the rainbow bridge. As the song begins beneath his feet the sharp-sighted eyes fix upon the stretching kaleidoscope that reaches back to the golden gates of Asgard, as yet closed to them in the distance. He is still and he is silent, but Thor can see awe moving through him like the sparks of lightning through a dreaming cloud.

“Welcome to Asgard, Agent Barton,” he murmurs; Thor can see Sif is hiding a smile when the man looks over.

“They should have sent a poet.” And already his eyes are wandering, _wondering_ back to the great floating city and its dream-worked spires with the high peaks of jagged mountain thrust proudly up against the horizon; the sky over the city is blue and clear, while at this distance it darkens to star-strung and novae-rivered nightfall. “Or at least Tasha. She’s Russian, I bet she could write a doorstop novel on this. It’s in her blood.” And then he laughs, the most simple-pleasured sound he has ever heard from the man. “Either that, or she’d just stand a better chance of drinking you guys under the table.”

A low cough startles them both; Thor is only all the more astonished when they both turn to see that it has come from Heimdall. But the gatekeeper has his golden eyes firmly fixed upon the distant horizon and says no more of what he sees. With a frown, Thor looks back to the archer.

“We shall have to have her to a grand feast,” he decides with that impulsive streak that has so often had Loki’s face cradled in one accommodating palm, “and any else of those who might wish see the land they have aided with their wisdom and warrior ways.”

“Guess it’s not really the time for feasting, though?”

_There’s always time for feasting in Asgard_ , Thor thinks, but he has the distinct impression it is not a sentiment such mortals will easily appreciate as his people do. “No,” he says instead, and the melody of the bridge beneath his own feet takes on a more minor key as he realises that his song is unaccompanied by the tread of another. “Come, then, and you shall meet the Queen my mother.”

This time Barton’s eyes widen just enough to seem discomforted. “Am…am I dressed well enough for that?”

Thor, though no actual expert in court etiquette – that is but one of the many things Loki had chosen to do for him – casts a quick look over the man. The uniform is no more bedraggled than anything the other returned Aesir wear, and with the gifted Asgardian-crafted quiver and bow he is much a warrior as any other. At court, truly that is what matters most. “You will more than suffice, Agent Barton. You bear your battles as well as any of the Einherjar.”

Glancing over to one of the poker faced warriors, Barton looks up, down. “Yeah, but I am cool without a helmet, though. In case you were wondering.”

Horses have been brought from the palace stables, one to each. Again Barton mounts well; in fact he shows little disorientation from the Bifröst, but then Thor suspects that the means by which he and Loki had moved from Midgard to Vanaheimr had probably been less kind. Barton had been unable to offer him much in the way of observation of that particular experience, given it went well beyond any point of reference he really had, but it was apparent they’d slipped between the realms by ways Loki knew all too well.

And his stomach turns. He still carries the two halves of Loki’s blade, and even with that and Barton’s assurance and his own doubts, he can recall too clearly Loki’s cold eyes, the cruel set of his lips, and the words that had fallen from them like acid-tinted rain.

_I am sorry_ , he thinks blindly, and knows not what for – if not everything.

The gates open to permit them the city. Commonly citizens will come to watch any great procession, ceremonial or no. These are quietened streets through which they ride. It sets his own heart ill at ease, though he had not given out any word of Loki except that he remains in Vanir custody.

But then, he supposes word has moved around the realms of ultimatum. It is foolish of the Vanir to have involved another realm, for all Midgard is generally regarded to be beneath notice. But to undermine one realm is to disturb all Nine – yet Thor understands as well as any seasoned diplomat that all would agree the Vanir are to blame, not when Asgard could end it simply by withdrawing and leaving the Vanir to their own matters.

And many of the realms have had experience enough of Loki to quite possibly believe it is but karma. He winces even now to recall the damned shield maiden’s original response to his request for a cessation of hostilities between their realms.

_“Are you so sure you wish to do this?” she asked, one eye closed and the other opened wide. “My Queen has not much patience.”_

_Thor’s armoured shoulders were set, as were his grim features and his grip about Mjölnir herself. “She waited a good many years for this.”_

_“As did your brother.”_

_Sigrdrífa’s casual mention of Loki put his teeth on edge; much as he had set his heart upon believing Barton, the mockery in those eyes was nigh unbearable. In his hand, Mjölnir whispered of vengeance and punishment, but even his berserker soul knew that now could not, would not ever be the time for such. “I need to speak with my advisors. This is not a decision to be undertaken likely, or alone.”_

_Her lip curled, and he could not tell if it were smile or sneer. “A king always reigns alone.” And when Thor stared at her, cold – for how could any such stripling upstart think to understand what he had been born to? – she merely shrugged, fine mail rippling over her shoulders. “Make your own decision, be not puppet upon the strings of your councils,” she said easy enough, “but then, you’re nought but a petty arrogant prince jumped up to the throne he never truly deserved. Perhaps by_ that _truth we can accept your delay.”_

_It was not an argument worth the having, for all his blood heaved with the desire to do not only that, but rip her fool head off in the winning of it. But she had turned, her riot of hair like a cloak to an enraged bull as she flipped one hand over her shoulder. “I will send her word!” she called back. “But I do hear Midgard is lovely this time of year…we do you’re you enjoy your time of it!”_

_From that alone Thor knew Sigrdrífa had never been there – seasons lay different across the blue-green orb by their placement on its orbit about its little yellow sun. Even he remembered that from visit and tutor alike. He might have found some comfort in knowing that the queen’s most trusted advisor had never set foot upon Midgard – but he felt cold, all the same. It mattered not even when a Vanir messenger hawk brought Nerþuz’s sworn affidavit to say neither army would move for three days hence. Leaving Týr, Ullr, Hogun, and Volstagg to their places, it was with a heavy heart that Thor returned to Asgard with Fandral and Sif at his side._

Leaving their horses, they enter the place by way of one of the great avenues, lined as it was by massive armoured guardians; golden and giant, they hold their swords beneath their chins and watch over all beneath them in much the manner of Heimdall himself. Barton’s regained composure breaks here, eyes wide when he looks up.

“Christ, it’s a good thing Stark’s not here. It’d just give him ideas.” And he looks to be somewhere between wanting to laugh or just be horrified when he muses aloud: “He’d be decorating the foyer of Stark Tower with giant Iron Man replicas before the week was out.”

“I have not seen his armour much in action, but it seems very advanced compared to days of long past, for your people. Would this not be a worthy manner in which to demonstrate his prowess in battle?”

Barton gives him a look that borders on pitying. “Oh, sure, he can kick a few arses to the curb in it, I’m not denying that. It’s more than the world honestly doesn’t need more than one Tony Stark, empty armour or not.”

Again he tells himself that this is not the time for such things, but Thor cannot help but take smug joy in the mortal’s wide gaze. “So you are impressed?”

“It’s like Vegas crossed with the Guggenheim and plated in gold leaf,” he says, and then gives him a rueful look. “Yeah. It’s impressive. No wonder Loki always complained his bed was too small.”

_Perhaps simple size was not the only thing he missed about his bed_ , Thor thinks, but it is a hard thought to consider long. Convinced of Loki’s schemings as Barton still appears to be, Thor’s own side aches yet and so too does his head. And his heart.

But they do not pause further for the outlander as they continue to make their way to the audience chamber, and the throne room beyond. They draw gazes from every corner as they do so. Cosmopolitan a court as the Aesir might keep, it is novelty indeed to see a mortal in their midst. Though not strictly a tall man, Barton moves well amongst their elite, head high, eyes watchful, his body as much a weapon as those he bears upon his back. Thor takes as much pride in that as he does in displaying his own realm before Barton’s sharp eyes.

_Loki chose well_. And that’s the shame of it, that this mortal had seen his brother’s lies when he himself might have condemned both mother and child for the gamble Loki had risked all upon.

The court has gathered, warrior and courtier and citizen and peasant alike. Thor strides forward between their endless ranks, red cloak a fluttering banner behind him. Barton is flanked by Sif and Fandral, and when he pauses before Hliðskjálf he hears them all drop to position. He bears no concern for Barton’s ability to fall into place, even when at the centre of everything rather than in his eyrie high above everyone else. His sharp eyes see what his mind will then take to alarmingly quick.

But Thor is focused entirely upon the throne. The figure that stands before it is familiar, beloved, a slender silhouette in gold and deep green; her regal gown is a circling pattern expanding in endless concentric wave. Her hair is down today, save for that which is pulled back with golden leaves, the blood-red jewels like buds on the verge on blossom. And her eyes are watchful, grave, the Allmother at her hearth where she will rule now in actuality as she always has in reality.

Thor bows first head, and then bends the knee. “Mother.”

“My son.” With Gungnir still in her hand she descends, one hand tender beneath his chin as she brings his eyes up to meet hers. “My king. Welcome home.”

“I come bearing news of our campaign.”

She nods, and practised and easy as the motion is from the corner of one eye Thor can see how tight her hand is about Gungnir’s shaft. “We have had word of the Vanir queen and her ultimatum.”

“And so shall we speak of it at council.” Now he rises to his feet, mother and queen regent at his side as he turns to face his kingdom, voice pitched just a little higher to carry across the great space. “But let it be known now the Aesir have no mercy for those who would seek to use those perceived as weaker than they as bait against those they know stronger!”

A ripple of words moves about the gathered multitude, quick and hushed. Frigga merely nods, her face a refined mask.

“And give you now word of your brother?”

Thor’s heart spasms, but for all his brother has mocked him in the past for always wearing said heart proudly upon his sleeve for all and sundry to see, he does know how to hold both his peace and his hurt. “Loki will return.” He knows his smile is the tight curved line of a scimitar, the bladed promise of vengeance yet to come. “He is Prince of Asgard, and I should think even now they rue the day they thought to bind him to their cause.”

The titter about the hall is not unwarranted, even Thor can admit to that. As a child given to mischief, more than one exasperated advisor to the throne had observed that should an enemy seek to gain some sort of advantage over the Allfather by kidnapping the seemingly less-warrior inclined son, Asgard would shortly be receiving not a ransom request, but rather a plea for someone to come take Loki home.

“A war council shall be called, at dusk,” he announces. “For now, I would have words with my regent.”

“It shall be done.”

And they call the three warriors to their feet, and move into the antechamber just behind the great curving promise of Hliðskjálf. Only when the doors are tightly closed, flanked by heraldic Einherjar, does Thor pull his mother close in great embrace. She feels frail in his arms, but then she has always seemed so delicate in comparison to the warriors whom she has been known to cow with but one withering look. There is nothing delicate in her eyes when she looks back to him now.

“You are working to free Loki?”

“As well as Asgard and Midgard alike from the choke chain Vanaheimr seeks to pull tight about both our necks.” He swallows hard, not knowing even now if he could bear to tell his mother of how he has failed Loki in this, for all he suspects he only behaved exactly as Loki had intended. “Loki works to do the same, for all it might appear he is but a hostage.”

Frigga nods and shakes her head at the same time, which to Thor has always seemed a physical feat quite unique to those who are mothers. “That does sound like my darling child, yes.”

Thor smiles, praying she does not catch the tremor of it; he thinks it is as much a need to hide that as courtesy that has him turning to the watchful three who have accompanied them into the antechamber. “Mother, I apologise for the delay in introduction, but I have brought before the throne a great mortal warrior.”

“Yes, we have heard tell of him,” she says, faint smile coming to her lips; Thor cannot help but frown.

“Muninn and Huginn?”

“His friends,” she corrects, already turning with the wave of one hand; there’s seiðr in it, and Thor feels a ripple of apprehension wend down his spine.

“What?”

The answer sees fit to present itself; Frigga only gives her lovely mysterious smile as another of the three sets of doors opens. And then there is a gasping breath behind him, all adherence to alien protocol lost in the passing of but a single second.

“ _How_?”

The transformation of Frigga’s smile into something whose mischief might have made even Loki proud is tale enough in itself. “She called to Heimdall. He…chose to listen, as it were.”

Agent Romanov, resplendent in her fitted black suit, moves forward to stand before the shell-shocked Barton. “Movie night this month was my choice,” she says, pale eyes for him alone even as she seems to speak to the room at large. “Clint promised he’d watch _Doctor Zhivago_ this time. I hardly thought staging an alien abduction was an elaborate enough excuse. He’s coming back to Earth, he’s got commitments he needs to attend to.”

The man all but chokes on his laughter. “ _Nat_.”

She raises a cool eyebrow. “Barton.”

“Oh God, I’m in _so_ much trouble right now.”

Thor gives his mother a startled look, but the queen regent nods as if it is only right that the woman should so keep her menfolk in line. The Man of Iron just gives him a shrug like he is used to such shenanigans, and the older man at his side looks rather like he is getting a headache from his younger compatriots. For his own part the archer continues to look rather like he is about to burst into hysterical laughter.

After a moment Thor gives into laughter himself; there have been so very few things to find humorous in these days. “Then we shall feast, my friends,” Thor says, warm even in his confusion as such unexpected reunion, “though I must first have words with my regent.”

“Hey, give us free range of the place, and I’m happy as Larry,” the Man of Iron says, “we only just got here ourselves. And that Larry, he was a happy guy, let me tell you.”

“Sif can aid you, and Fandral too,” he says, brow furrowed; he looks again to his side. “I assume you came for Barton?”

“Amongst other things.” Stark frowns then, looks to the older man. “The tesseract’s been…how did you put it, Dr. Selvig?”

“Misbehaving.” He looks distinctly overwhelmed by his surrounds, as if he is a pilgrim come unprepared before the very greatest of altars. “I…at the very least, we hoped for some further advice on how to quiet it.”

“I think I can offer you some of that,” Thor says, one hand moving to the sheath where he has secured both halves of the dagger. Stark and Romanov both catch the movement, though it is the former who speaks.

“But not through Loki.”

“That is a long story.” _Which you shall not know all of, though I am sorry for it._ “I shall tell you what I can soon enough. In the meantime, you should take your comfort and rest before we return to Midgard.”

Romanov’s eyes narrow, catlike in their regard. “So it’s true? This Vanaheimr has decided to use us as a pawn after all?”

“Yes.”

Stark curses, colourful and curt. “And given they’ve taken Loki, I’m assuming the tesseract is involved?”

“Indeed.” He tightens his hands, feels the archer’s eyes upon him. “But I must seek advice of my own before I can tell you more.”

“There’s got to be a shooting range around here somewhere,” Barton suggests, and Frigga nods with indulgent grace. She has ever been a most graceful hostess.

“Yes, I believe there are many things that will interest you here,” she says, waving her hand; Sif and Fandral seem to come to life beneath her easy invitation. “Come, Lady Sif and most dashing Fandral, we have company you must entertain!”

The mortals and their Asgardian companions move out in a tangled group, still debating their options. Only when they are alone does Frigga turn again, Gungnir still in hand and her skirts whispering across the golden-runed floors. “Come, Thor. There is someone you must see.”

But he does not move. He feels strangely like a boy again, shoulders hunched as he stares downward as he waits to be chastised for some foolish transgression. “Mother, I am sorry.”

She stops. “For Loki?” She gives a little laugh and glides back across to him, gentling his face upwards again, this time with her palm pressed warm against the hard line of his jaw. “Thor, I cannot imagine the Vanir were capable of taking him where he did not wish to go.”

And her easy faith only makes his seem all the less honourable. “Mother, do you _know_?” he asks, almost desperate. She tilts her head, her smile becoming something almost nostalgic, as if taken from a time past Thor’s own memory.

“I know that his first word was not mother, nor father, as is very common with children,” she muses, and he is almost afraid to ask.

“What was it?”

“I think you know.” And she steps back, her smile fading. “Your father is woken.”

“And this fact has been kept from all others.”

“Yes.” She raises her free hand, indicates another door with all the knowing grace of a Norn about her weaving of fate and destiny. “But he shall speak to you of such matters that are of import, now.”

“Thank you.”

When she smiles now, it is so brilliant as to almost have him turning away from the love that emanates from her as if it will never exhaust itself to ember and ash. “There is no need to thank me for what I freely give.” And he willingly leans down to let her press her lips to his forehead, her blessing borne upon the sweet scent of autumn harvest. “Good luck be with you always, my son.”

Alone Thor moves into the Odinsleep chamber. The great bed is at the centre of the room where is has always been, but his father lies not within the soft furs. Instead he stands to one side, hands behind his back, staring out at seemingly nothing. But both ravens are upon his shoulders, heads dipped conspiratorially close, and as he had before his mother Thor feels suddenly very young.

“Father.”

“Son.”

Thor says nothing more and waits upon the Allfather’s grace. He has learned something even in such short passage of time, perhaps; he can see a suspicion of as much in his father’s eye when he at last turns to face him.

“You must end this,” he says, simple in such fierce proclamation. Thor holds his head high, asks a simple question in turn.

“You are come to reign as king again?”

“No. This is your quickening.” For all his age, the Allfather’s step is sure and steady when he comes forward. “You must choose the life you will be born again to.”

“And in doing so I should also seek to destroy what I hold most dear?”

Many a time Thor has not given the answer his father had wanted to hear, but rather some fool idea of his own cobbled from his ideas of nobility and his basic drive to glory and battle. The expression Odin wears now is therefore deeply familiar. “No,” he says, “no, rather, you will preserve it.”

“Asgard. Unchanging. Eternal. Paradise at the head of the World Tree.” Much as his heart swells both with love and pride, for realm and father-creator alike, Thor cannot help the edge of scorn that dogs its quick heels. “And so what is it truly, then? A constantly wrapped gift, a toy never to be removed from its seals and box. You say you hand it to me, but you will do so only if I accept it as something to look at, admire, and never know for my own self!”

Odin is as one of the many statues, unmoving as the stones of deepest Mímir when he regards his son now. “This is no game for a child.”

“And what of _my_ child?” Thor demands. “ _Loki’s_ child?”

It seems even a serene king cannot help but wince at such honesty. “It is too late to deny it right of birth, perhaps,” he says, heavy. “But Loki is now and always your brother.”

Thor gives only condemnation in the silence, and Odin takes opportunity to strike again.

“ _That_ is the weapon I have given you, one to wield against fate itself.” And the two messengers seem obstinate in their all-seeing gaze from upon their master’s shoulders when he asks: “Will you then give such gift away for the easier route?”

“You believe this _easy_?” Thor asks, incredulous. “Do you honestly think I do not bleed, in body and in soul, for everything that has happened since the Vanir took my brother from me?”

“But did they take him from you?” he asks, relentless. “Or did he go willingly to their embrace?”

Thor spits the words out like bile. “He is no traitor.”

“Yet you doubted him.”

“I was angry!”

Thor expects Odin to shout back; so many of the great events of his life have been marked by some manner of shouting match between father and elder son. Yet Odin remains collected, his voice low. “So, too, was he. Or so I suspect.”

And Thor aches – for the memory of Loki’s alleged betrayal, and the memory of the true betrayal that had played out between father and younger son in the vault beneath the palace. “You should have told him what he was from the beginning.”

Odin’s slow shake of his head could mean anything to anyone. “It is a dangerous game that your brother plays, Thor,” he says, finally. “And it is not so much a game, not with stakes such as these.”

His temper rumbles again, storm seeking some hard shore to break against. “I know you think me a child, but I understand what this means.”

Odin snorts. “You are not a child. And neither is Loki.”

Maybe it is the mention of the word _child_ that does it, but for whatever reason Thor is ungraciously shunted back into dark memory of Loki in that cursed realm. In his mind so clear does Thor sees him as he had been in those damned robes, both during his deception and then further back. It should be obscene, knowing what he does now, to recall Loki in those days. He had seemed as drawn and desperate as any of them. And then, when they had been at the moment of choice, naked against one another, given over only to nothing but the love and need that had been part of them both for as long as either had ever known…

_(“No, I’m not yours. …not yet, at least.”)_

“Why would he even _do_ that?” he says, unexpected; the hurt in his voice is palpable, and the Allfather cannot help but seek to place some balm upon it.

“I should think it is an out,” he says, quiet. “If you do not do as he wishes, then he will have somewhere to go. A place where he is needed, where he is wanted.”

And that Loki should be so unsure of his place or Thor’s affection is almost enough to crush him to despair. “He is needed and wanted _here_ ,” he snaps, and Odin shakes his head.

“And yet he does not, even now, believe that with all his heart.”

“And is that _my_ fault?” Even as he knows that it is, he cannot help but surrender to sudden rage, feet heavy against the floor as he begins to pace. “Father, there are days when I find it hard to believe him adopted, you realise this? For you’re just as bad as one another – you, giving me kingship to temper my actions as an individual, and he for making me prove again and again that I will love and trust him no matter the lies and games he plies and plays me with.” He stops then, turns with hurt and fury alike burning his blue eyes almost to silver. “Am I really so unworthy of this damned throne, that I must be tested at every turn?”

Mjölnir burns hot in his hand, as if she too runs with the wild blood in her master’s thunder-wrought veins. Odin’s shoulders keep their proud set, but despite his sleep the weariness has not left him. His father grows old, Thor thinks sudden and strange, and that is what calms him. And only when his hand slides away from Mjölnir’s leather-wound haft does Odin nod, his one eye bright with harsh-learned prudency.

“You will always be tested, my son.” He sighs then, and Thor must admit it is strange indeed to see him without Gungnir to hand. “As am I always tested,” he adds, an afterthought given voice, and in that Thor is spurred to action.

“Father, you must trust me.” He pinches his lips together, then says in great blundering haste: “You must trust _him_.”

“As you have?”

The raised eyebrow brings a rush of shame, but even as it cuts through him deeper than any blade Thor keeps his head high. “I will never doubt him again.”

“His actions, perhaps,” Odin counters, and his regret seems to shimmer about him like a dull aura never asked for. “But his heart, never.” Thor feels his own lighten, though it tightens again as Odin goes on. “Yet even that is no guarantee.”

“Guarantee of _what_?”

Odin looks away, his ravens still thoughtful, ever watchful upon his shoulders. Then he looks back. “Might I have the two halves of the dagger he gave you?”

It comes again, that twinge in his side, a phantom pain he now believes might dog him unto forever. Gritting his teeth, refusing to reveal its existence to the Allfather even though he suspects Odin knows all of what Loki had said in that tent, Thor hands it over. His father’s hands are easy upon it, gnarled and knotted in the fashion of Yggdrasil’s visible roots. They remain strong yet, though in these days he seems more suited to Gungnir than the sword.

But it is seiðr he gives over to now, skin seeming to breathe and pulse with a golden light that makes Thor sigh, taking him back to many a childhood memory of warm summer days scented with sweet clover and hay, a hint of tart apple upon his lips and the warmth of another small body pressed into his side as they looked out to Heimdall’s observatory and the stars beyond. Thor starts when he feels cool metal in his hand, dragging him back to reality. When he looks down he finds the dagger whole in his hand, both halves fused.

“What is this?” he asks, frowning.

“A gift.” And Odin’s eye is unreadable when he murmurs but one word more. “Gríðarvölr.”

Thor feels his gut clench tight. “You named Loki’s dagger?”

“He named it. Many years ago.” It is not disappointment or despair that colours his words, but Thor feels he has missed something his father thinks he ought to have known for himself even as he explains further. “The metal is from the blade of a polearm of the same name, in fact.”

“I did not know of it.”

“Loki broke it quite some time ago.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I am not sure.” Thor knows his father is lying, and Odin’s single eye is watchful upon him now as his own hand falls away. “But I suggest you keep it with you.”

“Because of the runes?”

He pauses. “Yes.”

Such words all but _taste_ of that same sense of lying; they lie bitter upon the air between them, like spoiled blood. But then Thor must suppose this is just the way matters have evolved – and of the two sons who bear his name, Thor is not the one to challenge Odin’s machinations. That is Loki’s gift. That is why they are stronger together.

“And so I return to Midgard, and then to Vanaheimr,” he says with cool reserve while sheathing the blade at his hip, upon the opposite side where Loki had buried but one half. “While you remain here?”

He hadn’t quite meant the accusatory tone with which he spoke, but Odin seems to have expected it. “I am an old man, Thor,” he says, simple in a way that has never been entirely common to the legendary golden ruler who had raised his kingdom by trick and machination. “I have known for many years that the time would come eventually when I must hand over the throne to younger blood.”

“But you want everything to remain it just the way it was when you created it,” Thor mutters. Odin asks but one question more.

“Is that so wrong?”

His hand moves down, wraps about the leather that shields the blade from his skin. Then he is pulling it free again, one finger tracing the runes about its centre. Of these, he knows enough to understand the core of its meaning. _Greed_. A deadly sin, as much as pride or wrath.

“I will do right by the kingdom I was born to protect,” he swears, low and true; Odin’s hand is steady upon one armoured shoulder.

“My son, I know that you will.”

Thor closes his hand and gifts fate his fresh blood upon its bright edge.

 

*****

 

The long councils are still upon his mind when the Bifröst rockets them all back to Midgard. The simple consensus has been decided upon: Midgard is no toy. The war with Jötunheimr all those years had been fought for that realm’s safety, and Asgard as she is now will not belittle that effort merely to appease the Vanir’s childish posturing.

It had helped too, to have three warriors and one so-called sorcerer of that realm amongst them to speak of their need for assistance and not outright rescue. In the beginning there had been some degree of indulgence, which ended when Romanov punted a drunken warrior halfway across a banquet table for daring to examine her “armour.” The Man of Iron also aided matters considerably when a duel channelled rather too much energy from Mjölnir and wiped out an observation balcony. The fact that he saved three pretty maidens as soon as it collapsed did not go unnoticed (though a fourth admittedly winched herself to safety with her own veil).

Barton had kept much to himself, but from the whispers about court there is a reason why his quiver has been filled with arrows taken from Iðunn’s own trees. He’d also proven correct about Romanov’s ability; she had drunk three hale warriors under the table before nobly excusing herself from further competition with but one ladylike hiccup. Sometime later Thor had caught Barton stumbling her back to her chambers, and smiled.

And upon their leaving, Thor had stood before all the assembled court and shouted: “Let it be known that Midgard is no easy target! She is protected – both by our own long word, and those of her children who would guard her to their dying breath!”

When they return it is to a greeting party somewhat unlike the one upon Asgard, though it is just as grim. Commander Fury and Agent Coulson head up a group of armed and armoured soldiers, but Thor sees the relief on the latter’s face when Barton tips him a little wave that straightens into a proper salute when Romanov elbows him in the gut.

“Loki’s not with you?” Fury asks immediately, and despite the lack of deference he is accustomed to Thor manages a stiff nod with his answer.

“No.”

The man rolls his single eye to the heavens as if seeking divine assistance, which Thor finds somewhat peculiar given he is standing right in front of the man. “I’m assuming Dr. Selvig explained we’ve been having some _issues_ with the tesseract?”

“Yes, and unfortunately Loki is unavailable to aid us in that.” Before the man can curse – and from what Thor has seen, the man could win any flyting that required particularly obscene skills of word and phrasing – he turns slightly to indicate one of the two Asgardians who have accompanied him. “I have requested the assistance of another seiðkona, however.”

“Hello!” Snotra’s grin is wide and open, her skirts a joyful murmur about her rich curves as she comes forward, gives a pretty little curtsey before both Coulson and Fury. “It’s a pleasure to meet you both – and I _do_ hope our work together will bring much pleasure to us all.”

And by the sudden poleaxed expression the man wears, Thor knows again he could not have chosen more differently from Loki had he tried. It had been the same when he had called her to his place at the high table that first night, when he had first introduced her to Tony Stark.

_“What, you’ve got who now?” And Stark turned, narrowed eyes going abruptly wide. “…oh. Hi, there.”_

_Lovely in her veils and pearls, Snotra blinked at the unabashed fascination of the armour-clad Midgardian scientist-soldier. And then her smile widened in the fashion of a dawning sun. She had never been the greatest of beauties, but she was an Asgardian goddess, and to any of those from Midgard she could not help be anything but radiant. “Hello!”_

_Stark’s eyes take another pass, lingering a moment upon the deep inward curve of her bodice; Snotra always had preferred them over the higher lines favoured amongst other ladies of the court. Stark seemed to appreciate this as he turned a tilted eyebrow to Thor. “And this would be…?”_

_“Forgive me,” he said, and Thor tried to hold in his amusement as he took her hand, pressed the knuckles to his lips; from the tremor of it, the lady found the situation at least as amusing as he did. “This is the Lady Snotra.”_

_“Oh – wisdom, right?” The Man of Iron’s fascination took on a whole new speculative edge, his eyes firmly upon hers as if he sought to read her entire knowledge through them. “In that case, I think we’re going to get along just fine.”_

_He mimicked Thor’s own courtly gesture – though in truth he’d picked it up from Fandral within moments of observing the dandy at courtly play – though he did not release her hand immediately. Her smile warmed even Thor, and he was not the one it was turned towards. “Are all mortals quite as charming as you, or does the breadth and depth of my_ knowledge _really intrigue you so well?”_

_“Oh, size has always been a fascination with me. And a strength, as it were.”_

_Thor started to feel glad indeed that Amora had not been in a state fit to be involved in this; he was getting the impression that between those two their flirting might have brought down the entire palace. “Friend Stark, the Lady wishes to impart to you advice given by Loki as to the tesseract.”_

_Stark’s look was close to exasperated. “You make it sound so clinical, you know that?” he complained, but he was already budging over in his seat so that Snotra might share it with him. “But actually, it’s good to have new blood on the team as it were, though we did kind of pick up a new recruit when Loki and Legolas went AWOL.”_

_“Another scientist, perhaps?”_

_“Oh hell yeah. Bit of a specialist subject, for him. Though he’s more on the green than the blue end of the spectrum.” And Stark very nearly sulked even as he turned his full attention back to Snotra, who had already appropriated his wine goblet with the cheerful assurance of someone who knew her charm held power here. “Not that he’ll even show me his party trick. But I’m working on it…”_

“She is very wise,” Tony pipes up from behind her, and even as Fury gives him a sceptical look – Thor might have been offended, had he not learned enough of Stark’s tongue to understand it is sometimes as well-trusted amongst his own people as Loki’s is to Asgard – Snotra clicks her tongue.

“Or so they are so kind as to tell me.” Her full attention is upon him, and even the stoic commander cannot help but be startled again by the warmth that radiates from her like the promise of coming bright summer. “Do not worry, Friend Fury, I will do my very best to undo the binding upon the tesseract. Asgard has been sworn ally to Midgard for as long as I might care to remember, and I have no desire to let her fall alone.”

“ _Let her fall_ …” he repeats, careful. And then he turns his eye upon Thor. “I’m not going to like this, am I.”

It’s Stark who provides answer enough. “Sorry, I tried to send you an email but not even the big golden guy could pick up wifi from out there, huge-ass horns or not.” And when all eyes move upon him, Fury and Coulson’s particularly unimpressed, Stark shrugs and waves a hand towards the apparent King of the Aesir. “I suppose you ought to do the honours, yeah?”

“The Vanir have requested we withdraw our armies or they will use the tesseract to destroy Midgard.”

“Son of a _bitch_.”

Thor blinks, startled beyond the need to hide it. “I…follow the sentiment. I think.”

That seems Fury’s least concern as he flicks a hand to Coulson, who is already working quick fingers over a tablet in his hand. “And they have Loki to make this happen?” His eye moves to the silent Barton, narrows. “Though you seem to have retrieved my agent, at least.”

“Something of a good faith exchange.” And he has no intention of speaking of as much to Fury; in the end that is Barton’s call, but Thor suspects he knows how the archer will choose to make it. “Yet there is much work to be done. We can aid you in this, and we have sworn to do so in council in Glaðsheimr itself.”

The man remains unimpressed. “This involves letting you take the tesseract back to Asgard, doesn’t it.”

“I know not the exact sorcery upon it, but considering the nature of the warning and the one who gave it – I should think you would be glad to be rid of it.”

“You seem kind of reluctant to let her go, Fury,” Stark observes, surprisingly mild; Fury seems to recognise it as a warning tone when he swings around to the Man of Iron.

“We have invested a good deal of time and resources in this project.”

“Yeah, and the taxpayers have just got to get their payoff, right?”

Something brews between them, and Thor cannot be sure what nature or form it might take in the hours and days ahead. “Our chief concern is stabilising the tesseract before the armies must make their final movements,” he says instead, calling upon all the natural command of a king. “I suggest we begin immediately.”

“Hear hear for the King of the Aesir.” But Stark’s dark eyes are still upon Fury, as if silent conversation passes between them even though Thor is given to understand mortals are incapable of such. Then he turns. “C’mon, Fabio, Athena, we got some work to do.” He’s offering a hand to Snotra then in a high hold as if he’s inviting her to a pavane, his grin dangerously close to what Thor had once heard Barton refer to as _shit-eating_. “And I bet Banner’s gonna love you. Just don’t make him blush too hard, the man’s a bit shy sometimes. And he expresses strong emotion in…ways that are not always appropriate for a first date.”

Though he suspects there will be little he can offer given the presence of Snotra, Thor trails them all the same; Sif has disappeared with Coulson, Romanov and Barton, and Fury seems to have his own concerns. Thor still suspects he watches everything from afar as they enter a vast laboratory with but a few figures present in their clean white white coats. One small figure is particularly familiar, hunched over a haphazard collection of terminals. Stark is already dragging Snotra over to another man; Thor takes the opportunity to go to the other mortal’s side, drawn by what force he cannot be entirely sure.

“Hello,” he says, suddenly uncertain; she turns, surprise melting into quick pleasure.

“Oh.” She pinks, then, eyes very wide. “Hello, again! I heard you were coming back, but I didn’t think…” Her voice is somewhat too high but then she’s frowning, looking around, face crumpling in worry as it drops to a near whisper. “…is Loki not with you?”

Thor’s smile is as forced as his light tone. “No.”

“Is he all right?”

“He can handle himself.” Her curiosity is a palpable thing; he presses it back both gentle and firm. “It is kind of you to worry for him, Lady Foster, but he is where he needs to be right now.”

“Jane.” At first she almost looks surprised by her own words. Then she turns as firm as he had but moments ago. “You can just call me Jane.”

“Of course, Lady Jane.” He’s almost bemused by the grin she flashes him, but there’s such a lightness to her; he cannot help but be intrigued. As she turns back to a screen, hands moving quick, brow furrowed, lips pursed, it hits him suddenly: she reminds him of _Loki_. Yet in this she is only a younger version, with the veneer of something playful and childish worn easily over a mind too large for the body that seeks to contain it.

She looks up suddenly, as if sensing his gaze upon her, pushing hair behind one ear with cheeks taking a high flush. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude, I just…” Both eyes and fingers are already drifting back to the gleaming glow before her. “…it does weird things, sometimes. And without Loki, we’re kind of running blind. I mean, SHIELD’s been messing around with this thing since the forties, but sometimes it seems like we learned more with Loki in five minutes than they did in five decades.” Her smile is as rueful as it is wistful. “So he’s really not coming?”

The tug on his heart goes deeper than the one on hers, but he cannot help but be glad for it. Though there had always been circles interested in Loki’s talents, they had so rarely intersected with Thor’s own. “Not now, now. He has been…somewhat detained by circumstance.”

The dark eyes narrow slightly; she cannot possibly know the depth of the issue, but he feels uncomfortable beneath that sudden scrutiny, as if this Midgardian scientist seeks knowledge straight from his soul. “Right,” she says, slow – and then she is sighing, looking back to her many screens. “Well, Dr. Banner’s been a massive help, but the whole thing’s – who’s _that_?”

Thor follows her gaze, catches the movement some benches over. “I should let you get to work, and I assure you she will be of great aid to you. Her name is Snotra, she’s a fount of great knowledge even amongst the wisest of the Aesir. She is a seiðkona of great renown.”

Jane’s brow creases, her tongue clumsy over the word. “Seiðkona?”

“A sorceress, I think you might say.” And he cannot help the warm grin he gives her. “But then my understanding of this is that you are much the same.”

“Well, when I was a kid, I sure believed what happened when you tossed sodium in water was magic.” Wry again, she begins bundling her long dark hair into a ponytail. “I better go see what I can do,” she adds, though she cannot help but pause. “Is…is Loki really all right?”

It hurts, to think of the way he had been when they had last been together. “I would assume he’s been better,” he says, quiet. “But I will bring him home, you may be sure of that.”

“Good.”

Her simple vehemence does almost as much for his faith as had the archer’s words. When she goes to join the others Thor stays with them, though there is little he can offer by way of aid. The blade does have potential answers of its own, though he will not give it over. “It was a gift,” he says shortly, and after pictures and rubbing and some other analyses are taken he can place it back within a sheath upon his belt. It almost seems to reverberate with the low hum of Mjölnir’s ever-presence. The warhammer seems content enough to have his brother’s throwing dagger near, and in that too comes the faith Thor still finds hard to hold true to.

After some hours he leaves them. They offer food and beverage, but he chooses instead to go out, to survey the desert with arms crossed and head far back. In the quiet of this night he finds only a sky of unfamiliar stars. There’s no play of aurorae, no quiet dance of comet or novae, but despite all the differences from Asgard he cannot help but take a kind of comfort from it.

“Is there anything you need?”

Thor is not startled; quiet as the man’s approach had been, he had heard him long since. “Not that you could offer,” he says, though not unkind; the mortal gives a brief chuckle.

“Well, it was worth a shot.”

But even as the man in his neatly creased suit turns away, Thor calls him back. “Actually, perhaps there is, Friend Coulson.” When he gives him a quizzical look, Thor nods. “I would have a word with your Agent Barton, if that would be permissible.”

“ _Permissible_.” He rolls the word around in his mouth, almost as if he didn’t understand; Thor is moving to clarify when he laughs. “I feel I need to clone you and replace all my field agents with them, I’ve not had that polite a request in…ever.” Then he rubs his temple, mouth quirked in half a wry smile. “Although weeks with Tony Stark doesn’t help matters of comparison. Sure. It’s permissible. The last I saw him, he was up on the roof.”

“The roof?”

“Yes. Between his penchant for high places and Dr. Foster’s habit of stargazing for stress relief, there’s a little camp of deckchairs and Bunsen burners up there. Dr. Banner’s apparently quite fond of three am s’mores, from what I’m led to believe.”

Armed with directions, Thor takes the appointed path at a light jog. When he emerges upon the roof of the makeshift compound, he sees what Coulson had described. They’re not particularly high – the building is too impermanent for such – but a faint wind brings him snatches of voice. At the far end from the rooftop entrance there is a scattering of chairs, though neither of the mortals sit in any of them. They are instead before the railings, dangling arms and legs like children. From behind, they seem very small to him. Curved as they are towards other in a fashion that seems almost instinctive, they must be aware of it given his head is upon her shoulder and hers curves over it.

Thor is already backing away. There’s something deeply intimate in this. In a way it reminds him of how bemused he’d always been, when as children Sif would complain sometimes of how he and Loki could shut out the world entire between them. _You can always join us_ , he’d said. _No_ , she would always reply, _no, I can’t._ For the first time he thinks he understands what she had come up against, when finding the brothers together.

But it seems his reluctance has come too late, for Barton speaks. “Hey, Thor.” Romanov straightens, and Barton turns to give him a keen look even through the starlit darkness. “Did you need something?”

Something needful passes between the two mortals when their eyes meet, Romanov’s shuttered gaze notwithstanding. But she’s already risen, decision made with her lean body under perfect control. In that Thor can feel Barton’s loss, but he seems to take it in stride. Romanov nods to Thor as she passes, soldier to superior officer. But still she casts a last glance back. It is all they need, and then she is gone.

Still he feels awkward for what he has done. “I did not mean to disturb you both.”

“Oh, we have things we should be doing. Paperwork on my part, mostly.” Barton has turned again, back against the railings as he raises an eyebrow. “Thanks for that, Phil.”

“But this was your moment of quiet.”

“It was enough,” he says, easy as he repeats: “Do you need something?”

“Might I ask a question?”

He blinks, as if surprised by such polite approach. Then he shrugs. “Sure.”

“Did my brother ever speak to you of Jörmungandr?”

Barton contemplates his answer, as if sorting through all suitable words to find those that fit best. “I’m pretty sure I’ve said before he never really spoke about his other kids. Or even about the one he’s carrying right now.” He’s very watchful when he speaks next. “Jörmungandr’s the snake, right?”

“By your legend, yes.” He shifts, uncomfortable. “In truth, he was purely a creation of Loki’s seiðr.”

“A…creation?”

This is not an explanation Thor knows how to give; he does not think he truly understood at all what Loki himself had attempted to tell him. “He is both mother and father in this, though he…borrowed, from other sources.” He frowns, knowing the truth without even having been told it. “Father banned him from such practices, but not before he had wrought Jörmungandr, Fenrir, and Hel.”

“So what, he was playing Frankenstein?” At the blank look this earns him, Barton shakes his head. “Sorry. He was just…making something from nothing?”

“No. And yes. It is…complicated.” Hel especially so. Loki, never given over to the healing arts, had one strange summer decided to save a dying girl’s life. The confusion of all, from king to peasant alike, had been palpable; no-one had known if Loki’s intentions had been truly noble or just a seiðmaðr’s dark curiosity. But the result had been to no-one’s expectation. The Allfather had been obliged to place her between the living and the dead for by Loki’s hand she was become neither.

“Yeah, Loki’s not really into the simple,” Barton mutters, and Thor’s wan smile is as quiet as his voice.

“Jörmungandr was a powerful spirit, wrought in a serpentine shape. He was a magnificent creature when Loki brought back with him from the wilds of Álfheimr, claiming him as the son of a giant he had lain with in curious congress.” Thor looks down, remembering the wild rumours of court and country alike. Loki had cared not a whit for any of it, well satisfied in his own discoveries. “But he kept growing. In the end the Allfather bound his wellbeing to Midgard. Your world lacks the same wild magics of higher realms, it was simply easier to bind him here.”

Barton appears uncertain whether he should be offended by this. “So, now you’re wondering if he went visiting while he was here?”

“It’s well-known through the realms that Loki’s “son” is bound to Midgard, though only the Allfather knows how or where.” His fingers tighten on the clenched muscles of his biceps. “Considering the circumstances, I wonder if the Vanir believe he would threaten a world where Jörmungandr dwelt still.”

The archer casts back over the conversation, eyes narrowed. “Loki denounced him.”

“I just wonder,” Thor repeats, and Barton sighs.

“I know I can’t say I know a damn thing about how his mind works, but I don’t think there’s anything he did here that I need to tell you about.” He still seems to be contemplating this as he adds again: “He barely spoke of any of his children to me.”

Barton had been summoned as a servant to a liar, but Thor does not think the mortal much of a liar himself. No master would need such novice when it would be all the easier to do such work for himself. “Thank you,” he says, quiet, but Barton does not let it lie there.

“What would happen if Jörmungandr was freed?”

“I…do not know.” Despite the great scene Loki had caused at the time, and the Allfather’s furious proclamations as he had wrought the seiðr to create the seals, Thor had never truly understood the nature of Jörmungandr’s threat except as the shadows of Ragnarök itself. “He is not truly his own person. In many ways, he is…like a piece of Loki himself.”

“Why would Loki split himself like that?”

“He…” In this Thor cannot meet the man’s eyes; his heart is tangled upon itself as he looks down to his still feet. “…he often felt he did not know his place. Perhaps he felt that by shedding something he did not need, he would crystallise the worthiness he thought to be formless within himself.”

“Because that’s not weird at all.”

Thor looks up, unable to catch the wry note in his voice. “This is Loki we speak of.”

The wry grin fade within a moment’s more thought. “So you’re thinking this is something we should worry about?”

“Perhaps not.” The threads of future and prophecy and potential only tangle in his clumsy great hands; they are for puppeteers of Loki’s skill, for seers of his mother’s natural talent. “I just…worry. For him.”

“It’s weird, but…so do I.” And then he laughs, quick and sudden. “I still kind of want to put an arrow through his eyesocket, though, for that stunt he pulled. You’re _damn_ scary when you’re just the hugeass thunder guy with the hammer that spits lightning, you know that, right?”

“I…have some awareness of as much, yes.”

With a dismissive wave of times passed, Barton snorts. “It was real kind of your brother to throw me in that particular deep end, but there you go. Build a bridge and get over it, yeah?”

The conversation has come to its apparent end, but Thor feels somehow awkward leaving the man alone. “I…if I see Agent Romanov, should I tell her…?”

“No. No, I’m fine.” His eyes move up to the sky, glittering mirrors in the starlight. “I’m usually up here on my own.”

“Thank you.” The man looks over, startled. Thor nods, firm. “For everything you’ve done.”

“Well, maybe I wasn’t being paid for it – but it kind of ended up being my job. I think.” Then he raises an eyebrow. “Although if you wanted to pay me for it, I sure wouldn’t be telling the goblins who keep your gold no to a good handful of the stuff.”

“There will be great restitution for all involved when my brother is returned to Asgard with my child,” Thor says, perfectly grave. “But I shall make special mention of the service you have done both myself and my brother especially, Friend Barton.”

His answering smile is crooked. “Can it involve long holidays to places without giant snakes and pregnant mischief gods, then?”

“Of course.” With furrowed brow, Thor tilts a speculative look to the archer. “Tell me, how do you feel about dwarves?”

Barton’s eyes fall closed, and he wears just half a ragged smile. “Suppose it’s too late to tell you that Stark’s convinced I come from round Mirkwood way, then.”

 

*****

 

The tesseract is under lock and key. But considering his position, when Thor asks to be allowed into the chamber they can’t seem to think of an appropriate reason to deny him. Therefore he’s even alone when he enters, palms cupped close about his elbows. He has no inclination whatsoever to touch it. Mere fascination draws him close, and in the darkness the play of it is cool over his face. They seem convinced they have come to some sort of understanding already; within the day, Thor thinks bleakly, he will be able to return to Vanaheimr to declare war.

“I courted it, in my youth,” he murmurs, soft over the low constant hum of the tesseract in its careful casing. “But I did not know then the cost.”

“We were but children.” The answering voice is light in tone, but heavy with a thousand years of life lived in lies. “It was the intended gift of our parents that we need never know that particular truth.”

When he looks up, a figure flickers just beyond the reach of his sight; it makes his heart beat faster, harder. “Loki.”

With each step he solidifies more, the light of the tesseract limning him in white-tinged blue. “I see by the state of the tesseract that Barton performed admirably in a task I didn’t even explain the nature of to him first.” Loki continues his circular path about the object, slender and sleek in the leathers and light armour he favours when accompanying his brother upon a hunt. “Really, if the circumstances were different, I might even ask if I could keep him.”

It is so conversational, Thor has no words of his own to give, so tangled are they in his mind. But when Loki comes around again, he croaks out his question, heart and throat both aflame. “What are you doing here?”

Loki pauses, looks up. “As it happens, I am not.” One gloved hand gives a little wave, as if such sorcery is but mere child’s play to one of his abilities. “It is but a projection – a fetch, as it were.”

“Sent so very far across the realms?”

One hand presses down upon his abdomen, and with a start Thor realises it is flat and firm as it had been the day they had first travelled the Bifröst to Vanaheimr. “I did say once that my state heightens my seiðr, did I not?” he murmurs, and Thor swallows with no feigned difficulty.

“You did.” Their eyes meet across the blue gleam of the Allfather’s treasure, and Thor remembers how very cold and calculating they had been at the side of Vanir queen. Now they are wary, and tired, and deeply thoughtful. Loki says nothing, and in that his guilt is a crushing weight upon his chest. “I am sorry, brother.”

“For not believing in me? For believing my lies instead?” His chuckle almost hurts, so very accepting is it of what seeks to tear a thousand tiny holes into Thor’s noble vision of his own soul. “It was more or less my intention, I cannot fault you that.” When he looks up again, he seems wry as well as wary now. “You are a very poor actor, brother mine. I had to be sure you would be…convincing.”

“If not for Barton I would have declared you blood traitor to the throne and the realm alike.”

Thor’s flat tone masks his hurt, but then Loki has always been master of such masquerade. “Yes,” he murmurs, and Thor knows those blue-tinted eyes see right through him. “Yes, I knew he would be of use.”

_But what a risk you took._ Looking down to his own empty palms, Mjölnir a dull weight at his hip, Thor surrenders to both anger and shame. “I _betrayed_ you, Loki. You did what you thought you had to in order to save Asgard, and I just…I believed that you would betray us all. Just like that!”

When Loki does not immediately reply, Thor looks up with nails dug deep into his own skin. There’s a strange tilt to those eyes now. “Only because you thought I betrayed you first,” he says, quiet, and Thor’s words burst out of him like sudden storm.

“I love you!” he shouts. “I should have trusted you!”

Loki is unmoved. “But then I’ve lied to you more times that you’ll ever know. Why should you have trusted me in that?”

And Thor deflates, shakes his head; he has not slept well any of the nights since Loki had played his cruel hand. “Because you never lie to me without reason.”

Somehow it seems to have been the wrong thing to say. Loki remains silent and watchful, as if waiting for Thor to come to come to some greater conclusion. And then he sighs, but says nothing more.

“Are you well?” Thor’s eyes flick down, to the place where his child ought to show. He does not know why Loki has chosen to shield it from sight, but then for all the Vanir know of the child, the Aesir certainly do not. His stomach twists; Loki had promised his seiðr would not hurt the child, but… “…they…do not mistreat you?”

“They’ve believed me their ally for some time, and I bear the fruit of the promise I made. They would not hurt me, not while I have the child in my belly.”

Bile rises in his throat. Barton had known enough to realise Loki was lying about his defection, but not even Thor could tease out any other truths from their accompanying lies. And this is the most vicious of truths. “So it was all true. The hunt… _I_ was the prey you sought.”

Loki blinks. “I thought you just said you accepted my lies as being for your own good.”

“I did. I do! I just…” He cannot ever hope to articulate the roar of thoughts and feelings in his mind and heart and soul this very moment. “… _it_ …”

“It changes things,” he says, sudden and dull. “To know what I have done.”

“But why do you think you have to do these things _alone_?” Loki’s distrust is a hurtful thing, and his voice trembles with both anger and fear. “How long have you _known_ , Loki?”

He is looking away, to something Thor cannot see. “We do not have the time for this.”

“But you have to trust _me_ if we are going to have time enough to speak of this in the future.” The mighty Thor does not beg. But he will plead with those he loves dearest for permission to save them. “Loki. _Please_.”

And he closes his eyes, lips a wide scornful smirk. “Because I am the monster parents tell their children about at night.”

“You are no such thing.”

This time when he opens his eyes there is a flash of scarlet before the green settles once more beneath the blue reflection of the tesseract. “You have seen my true face, Thor. You know what I am.”

“I know what mask your blood gives you. I know better the mask the Allfather gave you to wear over it.” Stubborn as a mule, Thor digs his metaphorical feet deep and clenches his hands to tight fist. “But I’m still hoping to know true the deepest soul that lives beneath them both, and needs neither to be what he truly is.”

“And what am I?”

“You just _are_.”

As if quite disbelieving of such words Loki shakes his head, looks down to the tesseract. “You have been speaking with Mother,” he observes. “This is too eloquent to have been of your own devising.”

Thor does not know if Loki realises Odin is wakeful. Faint betrayal teases at his conscience, in that he will not say anything – though he tells himself it is simply that Loki is in enemy hands. Whether he plays a role or not – and how he hates himself for doubting that even now! – there is no point in giving him information that might compromise his own safety.

_Oh yes, my brother – no matter how you say I cannot be taught, I have learned much from you after all._

It seems he can do little else but move on to another subject. Loki’s face, projection though he is, seems lean and ravenous with the light casting deep shadow across his thought-drawn features.

“If you could always do this, then why the subterfuge? Why not just tell us here, before I had returned to Vanaheimr?”

Loki frowns, still looking downwards. “They needed my proof. And I could not just _give_ you this information.” One gloved hand passes over the tesseract, impatient; it does not quite skim its gleaming uppermost face. “In truth, it is the strengthening of the tesseract’s power that has allowed me to travel like this.”

“As a fetch?”

Loki’s eyes move up, sharp and sly. “Yes.”

Though he doesn’t quite understand his own motivation Thor obeys instinct and moves about the tesseract’s containment chamber to lay hands upon his brother. Loki is solid and sure beneath his touch – and Thor cannot help his smile even though it trembles about its highest edges.

“You liar.”

“And you are surprised?”

It’s the edge of arrogance that makes the kiss more furious than Thor had intended – but then there is much anger snarled up with the relief and resentment and outright _fear_ that he has felt so hard through these last days. It is life and death alike, both with the taste of blood upon his opened lips.

“I shouldn’t be,” he murmurs, stepping back with uncertain balance, though his hands remain upon Loki’s shoulders. “And yet somehow I am.”

When Loki smiles Thor can see clearly the rusty colour of iron-salt upon his teeth. “You and I, we are not those to do things by halves.”

“And you’ve never liked things to come easy to you.”

He cannot not deny it, his shoulders moves in easy shrug. “I do what I want.” The smile widens. “I go where I want.” His eyes darken, pupils dilating wider yet. “I take who I want.”

The scent of desire is dizzying, his body shifting in easy response to the sinuous arch of Loki’s body that follows the tilt of his head. “And how do you want me?”

“Always.” Loki’s voice is as hoarse as his. “Forever.”

Thor cannot protest even as Loki’s hand moves rough on its downward path, palming him through leather. “We have not much time,” he whispers against his ear, “but I want this. I need this.”

“ _This_ is why you came?”

When Loki looks up his smirk is a sharpened blade. “Perhaps.” And his hand moves into his opened trousers to close about his cock. Thor is hard even before Loki follows through with the press of his tongue to upper lip, slick reddened arch of muscle bisecting his thoughtful frown. But for all the assumed promise of that gesture Loki does not go to his knees. The leather of his glove about his cock remains, warm and soft; when he gives a thoughtful jerk, the friction of it startles Thor. It is painful, almost, even as his vision edges itself all in silvershot white. Gasping, knees half-buckled, he bends forward from the waist with one hand scrabbling for purchase upon Loki’s narrow shoulder.

“Oh, brother,” he whispers with tender glee, lips close against his cheek, “you always _did_ need the pain as much as the pleasure.”

“You do realise,” Thor breathes through gritted teeth, “you’ve not even apologised for stabbing me in the gut.”

Loki’s eyebrow is all knowing indolent arch. “I thought you’d understand it was all part of the plan.”

The hand has ceased somewhat now, at least; he is not jerking, for all the pleasure is blunted by the dry rasp of even that soft fitted leather. Instead it is just a play of fingers, squeezing and taunting in their ministration. “I still want an apology,” Thor manages to force out, ragged. Loki hums, soft.

“We all want a lot of things.” And his eyes are upon Thor alone, green and so very wide, when he whispers: “And I want you to come for me.”

The kiss that follows is more of a demand than the hand still upon his cock. Thor cannot even think to deny his brother what he wants, not now; time seems to pass and dilate and draw close about them both as Loki’s leathered fingers work their physical magic. And then he is coming, leaning forward, a cry choked from the place in his throat where it feels his heart has lodged. And when he opens his eyes Loki is raising his hand, thick white spend across the dark leather of his glove.

“Just what I needed.” And the silvered tongue moves out, dips against the white upon black; as Thor shivers with the ghost of his release, Loki closes his own eyes in vicarious bliss. But then he turns, opened eyes turned deep shining blue by the siren glow of the tesseract.

“ _Loki_ —”

“It’s all part of the spell,” he whispers, and then he’s turning back, his other hand extended. “But I need one more thing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you have my dagger?”

“I…yes.”

“Might I have it back, a moment?”

Ironically enough, it is that brief moment of hesitation that drives him forward fastest. He holds it towards Loki, two fingers and thumb upon its remade centre; a moment later Loki’s own hand flashes out, one blade catching him upon the side of his hand with sharp sudden pain. “Loki!”

Loki pays him no attention; in one hand red, the other white, both fresh upon the black of his leather. And then both hands are sudden and _blue_ , dipping into the bright gleam of the tesseract. There comes the scent of hot iron, like a forge – and the scent of the sea, oddly enough. But then he can taste storm upon his lips; this one is cold like snow.

When Loki draws back, he leaves the dagger in Thor’s hand; the metal is as cool as his taste had been. “Loki…” he breathes again, already reaching for him. Like a trick of the light he dances back, faint shake of his head as his eyes stray again to the strengthening glimmer between them.

“You are no seiðmaðr, and it will not wish you for a master. But it _will_ listen to you, for now.” This time, when Loki looks up, his eyes are nothing but deep still green. “It will recognise you, and your need.”

When his own tongue moves over his lips. Thor finds them dry. “My need?”

“Me.” And for all the fierce pleasure in those words, Loki’s eyes are very grave. “You give your blood and your seed, for me. For my own.” And again he is backing away; Thor can feel the shift in the air that speaks of gathering energies, twisted pathways. But Loki is yet still whole. Loki is yet still _here_.

“Wait.”

He blinks, but even Thor can feel again the telltale quietening of the leylines. “Yes?”

“I love you.” He thinks there should be more. He even opens his mouth to say so. But then he closes it. Simple has always been his way. “ _I love you_.”

The green eyes are clear of any blue taint when the faintest smile turns his own silent mouth upward. Then Loki strides across the interstitial space between them, slim shadow with the babe concealed, one hand raises to move about his neck and pull him down. “Come to war, brother.” The hot lips upon his whisper something that seems dangerously close to song. “ _I am waiting for you_.”

Thor feels him go. But he does not open his eyes, preferring the faint memory of lips and fingers and the soft sound of laughter. Only when there is a hesitant rap upon the glass does he at last let the memory go.

The large dark eyes of Jane peer curiously at him through the glass. Loki is gone, but Thor can still feel laughter hanging upon the air. From her frown, he does not doubt that Loki has shielded this from all eyes but their own. Still he is flushed when he steps out of the chamber, head tilted in bashful query.

“Are you all right?” Her upper teeth catch over her bottom lip. “You…don’t look so good.”

“I am fine, Lady Jane.” Clearing his own throat, he bites back on the words _but only so far as I can be, knowing what games Loki plays_. “But we have work to do.”

And she nods, fierce warrior in her own way. “Right. So let’s do it,” she says, though Thor’s eyes have already moved to the breaking dawn of the Midgardian day. Vanaheimr’s clouded sky is hidden behind great swathes of universe between them, and Loki with it, but Thor knows where he waits.

And so shall he go to him, stormborn warrior riding the wild hunt upon fierce tempest of his own creation.


	12. With A Dead Sound On The Final Stroke Of Nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, despite having had a complete mental breakdown on Thursday that persisted through the weekend, I am managing to keep to the weekend update for the third one in a row. ;_; Because honestly, the real climax of this story? Ought to be in the next chapter. The final three are more the clean up and come down and Thor and Loki need to deal to some other matters before the Alleged Happy Ending comes through. Because I swear, that was the whole point of this damn fic. _To give them a happy ending, goddammit._
> 
> In the meantime, have this trainwreck. I continue to slaughter Norse mythology with merciless amateur theatrics, and the poor Avengers continue to wonder what in God's name they are even doing in this fic. And I, the author, continued to be humbled and amazed that anyone is still out there reading this, especially after my latest braincrash. Thank you. _Thank you_. I just hope this damn terrible chapter is worth your time, o treasured Reader.  <3
> 
> And here's some musicfeels for this update: [a live acoustic version of Neil Finn's _Sinner_](http://claricechiarasorcha.tumblr.com/post/33074802160/at-some-point-i-should-probably-make-a-proper). Because: REASONS.
> 
> _Today I am still disconnected_  
>  To the face that I saw in the clouds  
> And the closest I get to contentment  
> Is when all of the barriers come down 

Dawn has long been Thor’s favoured time of day. Yet after having left Jane to watch it alone, save for a desert of cool sand beneath his feet, he finds he does not care much for it. He has been to battle many a time without his brother, but at all the most important Loki had always been near enough his side that even in full berserker mode Thor could never have felt himself alone.

Thor does not doubt that Loki will be there for this engagement. But he will stand on the wrong side of the battlelines long since drawn between the Vanir and the Aesir, illusion or no. With that fact comes cool resentment – both of Loki, and of his own idiocy. Even now, after all that has been said and done, some part of him is still afraid their father had been right, that Loki will not ever believe him: that he will take both himself and the child to a place that he has paid for in betrayal and blood for fear that Thor’s love has always been naught but pretence and imagined obligation.

“I love you.”

The words hand upon the air, as if uncertain of where Thor wishes them to go. There is no wind to carry them distant, and not even a conjured storm could take something so ephemeral from realm to realm. His eyes drop to his hand, and he opens the palm the gold that breaks over the unfamiliar horizons. The work of the mortals in releasing the shackles upon the tesseract goes well, and the Asgardian contingent will return to Vanaheimr today to end this farce on all sides. But he remembers Loki’s workings, his seed and blood given over to the tesseract, and Thor cannot help but wonder.

And for the first time Thor believes it is possible to love someone and yet betray them with one’s first breath beyond their last kiss.

_But then all things are possible – and then most things never come to pass._

Thor has never been well-inclined to brooding alone. But then Loki would usually be the one to seek him out. He feels a distinct flash of temper as he grips his upper arms tightly, frowns up at the sky to consider his options. He has bothered Barton enough, if the mortal is even yet still awake. But given Sif’s temperament and stamina, he thinks she will be ear enough.

It feels unfair to use her so. But then they have had little time alone between council and war and this return to Midgard, and the questions in her eyes have followed him for days. He does not wish to give her all the answers she undoubtedly seeks, but he does not doubt she deserves to know more than what she already does.

For all the early hour, it does not surprise him that it is Agent Coulson who comes to his aid. Impeccable in his grey suit, he seems to be a creature who needs little sustenance and less sleep; both are qualities that would do him well should he seek engagement as a major-domo in even amongst Asgard’s court and lords. Coulson scarcely needs to ask before he escorts Thor to another part of the compound, and despite their stark difference in height he moves with fluid ease at Thor’s side.

The two female warriors stand together both with peculiar contraptions upon their heads: yellow-lensed glasses over their eyes and great cups over their ears. They pay little heed to his approach, though he does not doubt they are aware of his coming. He cannot resent that, for it appears they are in the middle of a lesson. Romanov is adjusting Sif’s form, and the latter has both hands up and stretched before her with one of the unfamiliar projectile weapons in hand.

Coulson covers his ears with casual grace when Sif pulls the trigger of the weapon, though Thor finds the noise bearable enough. Yet even her strong body rocks somewhat with the force of the thing, for all she stands tall. She seems first surprised, and then irritated; she’s indicating the off-centre hit which the other woman seems to find satisfactory enough as she removes both glasses and earmuffs. Sif is actually grinning when she turns around, doing the same. When she raises a hand in greeting, Thor cannot help but smile broadly back.

It fades somewhat when the doors opens to admit the door back into the glass-walled vestibule where he and Coulson stand. “I am sorry, Agent Romanov. I always seem to be interrupting your time with others.”

“Oh, it’s fine. I was taught long ago to take what I could when I could, and leave it at that.” The look she gives Sif is somehow arch, somehow amused, and very lovely as she inclines her head. “Lady Sif.”

Sif does the same, and the admiration in her words is writ very clear. “Lady Natasha.”

As they turn to walk away, Thor can hear Romanov falling into quiet conversation with Coulson; he keeps his voice low when he speaks. “You enjoy her company.”

“She is more amenable than most warriors of her experience.” One of Sif’s sharp elbows finds its way into his undamaged side. “And a good deal more inclined to _thought_ as well as action.”

Thor lets himself bear a long-suffering grin for that, though his words are perfectly serious. “If time permits, we should have them all back to Asgard.”

“Yes.” There’s an odd note to her voice, and when he glances over it is to find faint sorrow upon her stern features. “They are so short-lived,” she murmurs, eyes trained directly ahead and upon their path. “But they do burn so very bright.”

That is but one reason why they do not often spend time in the company of mortals. There are of course further reasons beyond number, and one of the strongest is the Allfather’s decree that the Aesir and all other immortals do not interfere in the affairs of humans and mortals. But in the end Thor believes it harder to see how all they change while Asgard does not. The golden realm is eternal, and for all the love he bears it from this distance such static life seems stifling, unsettling.

In the chambers given over to their personal use, Thor takes a seat. Sif does not; she begins an uneasy pace, back and forth between the shadows in pensive beat.

“You seem troubled, old friend.”

Her chuckle resonates low and soft. “You have seen Loki.”

The beat of his heart quickens just enough to throw off the timbre of his words. “How did you know?”

“I know.” Something very like sorrow shifts through her body, her shoulders hunching closer together. “I can feel him around you.”

Thor is silent. With a sigh Sif halts, moves lightly upon the balls of her feet until she faces him once more. Her step is light when she comes to stand before him, though her gaze is heavy yet.

“What happened?” she asks, deliberate and demanding; Sif has never done well with deference. It is but one reason why she is both unabashedly a woman and one of Asgard’s finest warriors. And she is sitting at his side now, leaning close when she speaks again in fierce query. “And I don’t mean even just now. I mean before. On Vanaheimr.”

It is a fool question, and he knows it. “You do not know what he said?”

“Well, certainly you never told me.” Long fingers drum upon the tabletop, her short nails crusted with dirt. “I did ask Agent Barton, but he said that the _show_ Loki put on had been meant for you, and it was not his place to speak of it.” Her fingers halt, and the grimace that crosses her face seems almost painful to her. “He said he didn’t know enough of the situation to say what was lie and what was truth, and he had no wish to create further issue by muddying the matter any more than it already was.”

It would be cruel to deny Sif a truth she deserves as much do the Warriors Three. But then Thor does not even know it himself. Still he shakes his head, offers what he can to his oldest friend.

“You remember how it was. In Vanaheimr.”

“Yes.”

Thor speaks very quickly, for fear of the words never coming otherwise. “Loki told me it happened that way because he orchestrated it.”

Her body, honed and trained to a warrior’s elite, goes very stiff; one hand is already reaching for one of the knives she always wears concealed about her person. But Thor bridges the space between them, catches her wrist, holds it tight. Her eyes are furious and dark upon his, and he grimaces fit to match the one she had worn but moments earlier.

“Yet I remain uncertain as to how true that is. His intention in telling me these things was to have me not only doubt him, but be _furious_ with him. He therefore said…very hurtful things.”

“And Barton knew them for lies.” Her hand spasms as he holds her wrist tighter still. “Even when he didn’t know the truth.”

“I’m not sure who knows the truth,” Thor says with perfect honesty. “I can’t even be sure _Loki_ does.”

“Then why do you trust him?” she demands; she wrenches her wrist free, both palms slamming down upon the table. “Thor, do you even know what he _wants_?”

“Sif, you were not there when we ended our captivity,” he begins, and she shakes her head in fierce denial.

“Which by his own word Loki might very well have set up,” she counters, and Thor tightens his own hands upon the table.

“If he did, I believe it went beyond what he expected.” He must look down, too ashamed now to meet her eyes as he speaks the words that leave his heart cold ad strange. “Loki believes I do not truly love him.”

When she snorts, he can imagine the whipcrack flick of her hair as she tosses her head. “Norns below… _everyone_ knows you love Loki. Why else would you bother with him?” Her tone turns ugly with fury again. “With someone who led us into peril for his own gain?”

“I am not certain that that is actually how Loki sees it,” Thor says, still unable to look up; Sif’s frustration only grows further, her fingers beating out a military tattoo upon the wood.

“Then what about Volstagg? How do you believe _he_ should see it?” Her laugh is short, much sharper than any blade she might think to wield. “Or his children? Or his wife?”

A winces draws deep furrows through his face entire. “Loki always made sure he was cared for.” Yet if Loki indeed does not lie about Vanaheimr – and in his heart, Thor does believe that Loki had thought it the only way to bring matters to this head – all their suspicions in that dank dark dungeon have been proven true. He struggles to speak around sudden roiling nausea, his tongue thick. “And in the end, we likely just proved to him what he believed already,” he says, voice very quiet. “That we thought him craven, a coward.”

“He put us there!”

His head snaps up, words a shout more than fit to match hers. “As a test!”

“ _Our_ worth was never in question!”

“Was it not?” Already he deflates, looking down again to hands below the vambraces worn tight about his forearms, but one aspect of the armour he has been so proud to wear from the day he had first proved worthy of it. “I…I have loved him my entire life, Sif. But what does it say for the worth of that love, that devotion of my affections, that my brother feels that it must be proven under such hideous circumstance?”

“His perception of your feelings, true and deep as they are, is not your fault.” But for all the trembling anger of her words, her actions soften as she leans forward, catches his face between her hands. “Though that is not even the worst of it,” she whispers, and something more of fear has replaced her fury as she searches his eyes. “Thor, what of the child he carries?”

His own eyes are damp, and for that moment he cannot speak. Sif nods, as if she had expected such, and her sorrow now outweighs her anger entire.

“It was conceived that day, wasn’t it?”

“ _He_ was,” Thor corrects in low murmur, and Sif nods.

“By Loki’s will.”

“By the will of us both,” he corrects again, though his words are dull with the bright glare of such truth. “It had to be thus. It could have happened no other way.”

Her hands are cool against his skin, and he almost shivers when she lets them fall and leans back. “So he manipulated you into a situation where you would willingly get a child on him.”

“Yes.”

His simple acceptance of this fact sends a spasm of reawakened anger across her features. “ _Thor_ —”

“It was always going to happen,” he interrupts, and his own face has gone very still and very, very grim. “No matter what our father might have done to thwart it, the child is the subject of a prophecy. And our mother could tell you that no matter their outcome, all prophecies will have their day of coming.”

Her brow furrows. “What prophecy is this?”

“That is not in question right now.”

The look she gives him now is so very spookily close to the one Loki would choose that for a moment he wonders if his brother had chosen to wear the form of his former lover. “ _Thor_.”

His tongue flicks out, dampens dry lips. “He is said to be the downfall of Asgard,” he admits, and the words are like broken glass ground both into his throat, and into her heart. “That is why the Vanir want him.”

Her lips press close together, as if she holds back an undulating cry to war. When she speaks, her voice is rough and ragged, a warrior worn down by war but more than willing to bring it again. “And now they have him.”

The fatalistic tone rouses Thor’s own temper. “Loki has no intention of being their thrall.”

“Loki likely has every intention of doing what he wants,” she shoots straight back, two spots of colour now burning high in her pale cheeks. “He’s already hurt you once, and badly at that! Are you sure you want to go charging into this war for _him_?”

“Are you suggesting we withdraw?”

The low warning of his voice, so at odds with the usual shouted fury of his favoured form of debate, sets Sif upon careful defence. She leans backward, hands very still upon the table. “Loki put himself in this position.”

“Because he knew I would come for him.”

“To what end?” She struggles to keep her voice low; though Sif is not one for shouting, Thor has often found that he is one of the few who can break her carefully honed reserve, can draw from her the volatile emotion she hides as weak and womanish. And her accusation rings all too true when she demands: “What is he trying to make you do now?”

“I don’t know.”

The bland honesty of that rocks her back like a blow; she is incredulous when she shakes her head, seeks to regain equilibrium. “All right, then. This is a fool question, I know – but are you not afraid of that?”

“No.” And it is as much the truth as he will ever know. “But I am afraid for Vanaheimr.”

She frowns. “ _Vanaheimr_?”

“It will fall for the bitter whim of one of its own.” He shakes his head. “Some would call it petty, and childish – but this is no small matter, and this is not the play of children. I would not have Vanaheimr destroyed for such a thing. Not when I am here to stop it.”

“And what of Asgard?”

“It will never fall. Not while I am king.”

There’s both relief and suspicion making war in her eyes. “Is that your choice, then?” she asks, deliberate and slow. “Asgard, over your brother?”

“Loki is of Asgard – and to my heart, great fool thing though it may be, they are one and the same.” Sif’s lips tighten, and he almost smiles. “And believe me, Sif, I understand well that I and Asgard are the same to his.” It hurts to smile wider, his heart threatening to burst under such strain. “That is why I do these things, Sif. I am the one of fool actions ill-thought, if thought of at all. This is his long game.”

“And so you will let him play it.” She sits back in her chair, eyes closed, chest moving erratically like a seer giving over prophecy under the influence of psychotropic elixir. “But what if you are wrong, Thor? What if Loki means to destroy Asgard after all? What if he means to tear her heart out and eat it alive and raw and bleeding?”

“Then you must go back to Glaðsheimr.” His heart tightens again, muscular spasm as if it intends to stop its beat this very moment. “And you must give our father a message.”

Her eyes snap open as she looks back to him once more. “What?”

“ _I forgive you for what you must do to protect your realm_.” Simple and searingly honest, and he smiles as if fit to break. “But then, it is not so noble a final gift on my part. For if I am dead, then I will be unquiet until Loki is with me once more, no matter how our lives were ended.”

Her silence is overwritten by the startled look in her eyes; it is not quite a condemnation, but it is close enough. Then her eyes drop, and her voice with it. “You are a fool, and so is your brother.”

“Yes. But we are fools together.” He leans over the table, places his hand over hers. “One way or another, Sif, it will end with this battle.”

Her other hands moves, lays over his. “I need a promise from you.”

“Yes?”

At first she does not speak, merely holding his great hand between the calluses of her own. Then she sighs, her nails digging deep into the weather-worn skin. “If he betrays you – if he betrays Asgard, and you have opportunity to take him down…please. Do it. And then live. For us. For your kingdom. For your father, for your mother.” She cannot look at him, but he can almost taste saltwater upon the air between them. “For…”

“Sif.” He moves his other hand, presses it to one cheek, tilts her face up to meet his. “Please don’t ask me to make a promise I cannot keep.”

Her eyes, so sharp and blue and true, search his; Sif has never been suited well to sorrow or sadness, and her frustration rises again. “Why does he have you, always?” She swallows hard, eyes aglint with exasperated fury. “Why do you love him so much, when you cannot even trust that love to make him better than what he is?”

One thumb courses gentle over high cheekbone. “Because he is the best of what he can be already,” he says, and his smile hurts them both. “Our love cannot change one another, Sif. This is how we always were, and will always be.” He leans close, forehead pressed against hers, her breath slow and true against his skin. “Thor and Loki. Loki and Thor. There is nothing even we can do to change that.”

“You idiot.”

But she lets him draw her close, their armour pressed close between the hidden soft places of their bodies. “He’d agree with you,” Thor murmurs, and she lets out a sharp laugh.

“The bastard.”

“I know what he is.” He turns his face into the warmth of her neck. “And so does he.”

They are quiet for a long moment, like children embracing in the darkness with the hope that the monsters concealed there will not see them. “I would do it for you,” she whispers, a disembodied voice for all he holds her tighter still. “If you would but ask.”

“I know you would.” And he sighs. “Which is why I will not.”

She is silent, and so is he. For now there is nothing more to say.

 

*****

 

“I have much appreciated your aid, Friend Stark,” Thor says, shaking his hand tight even as the man winces at the god’s mostly-restrained strength. But he stubbornly holds on until Thor relents, dark eyes dancing with amusement all the while.

“Eh, glad to help – besides, I got some real great ideas from you guys and your madass interior designers.” Now that he has his hand back, bruised somewhat or no, he sweeps it all about the vast space of the New Mexico desert. “I can just see it now: giant Iron Man suits. Every corridor. Every board room. Even all down Fifth Avenue on special occasions.”

Barton buries his face in his palm with an audible slap, and somehow Stark brightens impossibly further.

“Oh, and I hear from Legolas there are trips to dwarftown going? Because much as I’m not one to steal other people’s weapons tech, after seeing _that_ thing up close I’m real interested in what elements you have that we don’t.” Even as he fixes his eyes upon Mjölnir, there’s a strum of fingers upon the gleaming second heart he wears next to the organic one. “Because if we’re talking payment for services rendered, I know that’ll do me. I mean, what else do you get the man who has everything, if not something to _totally_ ruin Tom Lehrer’s periodic table song?”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come back?” Barton interrupts, and Thor blinks over at the grim visage of the archer. Somehow he cannot help the quiet smile; against instinct, he has become rather fond of him.

“Much as we have valued your aid, your place is with your people. It is a pity Vanaheimr felt to involve you even this much.” And there’s a twist in his heart as he considers how likely it is that Loki’s interference had been the drawing point for said involvement. “But if anything goes terribly awry with the tesseract, you must call to Heimdall. We will not leave you alone to deal with such matters.”

But much as things seem to be in some order, Romanov is staring at the Man of Iron with an expression that somehow puts Thor in mind of his mother. “What’s with the look, Stark?” she asks, mild enough, and he scowls.

“The tesseract.”

“What, your genius hasn’t fixed it?” Thor feels both Sif and Snotra move uncomfortably next to him, but Stark shrugs.

“No, we’ve done what we could – and we’re pretty damn awesome, just so you know. It just seems weird to me, that they’ve been arsing about with this for _how_ long, and only just now they’ve pulled in the guys interested in making wormholes with it?” The hard expression he wears now almost seems entirely unsuited to his usually mobile features. “Besides, my father’s the one who fished it out of the ocean. And sure, he was into anything and everything, but he was working during the Cold War. He had his priorities.”

“So did you,” she returns flatly, and he raises an eybrow.

“Notice that past tense you just used? Useful grammatical distinction, that.”

“Do you think the stabilisation is not going to work?” Thor asks, even as he feels Snotra place a calming hand upon one vambrace. Stark shakes his head, seeming to be frustrated by something he cannot quite articulate.

“Oh, no, Bambi’s intel did what was necessary. And Our Lady Wisdom here backed it up just fine.” His arms cross over his chest and the gleam hidden there, and he frowns. “This is more…a homefront issue, shall we say?”

“Heimdall is always watchful,” Sif offers, and Stark raises both eyebrows with a little tilt of his head.

“Yeah, and you’ve got your own backs to watch.” His gaze moves up to the closed sky, and he shakes his head. “You know, for all the weapons I sent to the warzones, jackshit of that prepared me for the real thing,” he mutters, and then slaps Thor on the back. “Go give ‘em hell for me, Fabio.”

“I will, and with pleasure.”

They all make their goodbyes; Stark and the Lady Jane are more effervescent while both Barton and Romanov remain both watchful and somewhat distant. But then that seems to be their way. They are hard for him to gauge, both alone and as a pair; the bond they share seems almost as if they are siblings, but then it goes deeper again. It resonates with him on more than one level, makes him happy even as it tugs deep strings in his heart.

Jane stands before him now, her dark eyes bright with a sudden dancing mischief. “Tell Loki he’s welcome back here anytime,” she says with a bright smile, “and not just for his brain.” And then she’s taking him by surprise, small hands upon his neck as she tugs him down. “Give him this for me, yeah?”

She tastes faintly of sunshine, he thinks with sharp surprise; like rain fallen while the sky is blue yet. Then she pulls away, cheeks pinked, and he feels dazed. “I will do so,” he says, and the faint jealousy twists in his heart. But there’s warmth in it – and hilarity, too. Stark’s prediction as to the preferred direction of her affections appears to be somewhat misaimed. The man looks rather put out upon the sidelines while Barton’s nudges him with an elbow and Romanov smirks. Thor cannot hold back his own broad smile. He has not known them long, and they are Loki’s compatriots, but he realises he will _miss_ them.

“Be well, friends of Asgard.”

“Friendship is magic,” Stark agrees gravely. This earns a choke from Barton; Thor glances over but the man has turned away. Stark’s grin is wide, but Romanov’s furrowed brow stops him dead in his tracks.

“Should Fury be told that you’re going?”

“He knows.” Coulson steps forward from a distant car, ever the calm and efficient centre of the storm the mortals have named SHIELD. “He wants you to know you are welcome to return when matters are settled.”

“Like we get to dictate to the gods,” Stark mutters. “Besides, he probably just wants his little toy all to himself again.”

“Some toys were never meant to be played with,” Thor returns with solemn sincerity, and then mirrors the sloppy salute the Man of Iron gives him. With one last smile he turns his face to the sky, and shouts to Heimdall.

Then, they are gone.

 

*****

 

When they are returned to Vanaheimr it is the last day; the ceasefire will end when the sun is at its highest point. And despite the ever present cloud cover every warrior will know when that moment has arrived. It is all but born into the very blood that courses through their warrior-raised bodies.

They had hit the ground just after dawn, and Thor has not stopped since then. Though the men have been raised to such, and are well-trained and well organised by those left to their command in the king’s absence, Thor knows his duty. He speaks to sentries and to scouts and then walks the lines and the spaces between tents amongst the various camps; he rides between their multitudes with helm glinting silver-bright upon his head and red cape an unfurled banner of challenge and glory behind him. His great standard of hammer and lightning is borne true before him, and he fears not to be known or to be seen. He is the first son of Odin, the heir of Asgard, the king apparent while the Allfather dreams, and he will give him back a world worth awakening to.

And for all this realm is not his, he feels it tremble beneath his feet when he dismounts for the last time this morn. It is not Vanaheimr he feels, for all he wishes only for peace to be brought in the wake of this war his berserker spirit so deeply craves. Rather, it is the stretch and shudder of the very deepest roots of Yggdrasil. Every realm is held aloft by those branches, but such forces work unseen beneath the tread of all those the World Tree holds aloft. And he thinks back to the tesseract, and remembers Loki’s words of what seems an age ago.

_(“It remakes reality. They call it an energy source. It is not. Better to name it a catalyst, of a sort. It offers in return for what it takes the reflection and amplification of our own deepest desires, though it can take any strong emotion and make of it what it will. It creates nothing. It merely takes the pieces offered upon its Eldritch altar in order to reconstruct a whole greater than the sum of its pieces. You cannot make anything from nothing, Thor. But you can make everything from even the smallest of somethings.”)_

And he shivers. In truth he does not know what Loki wishes of the thing. Though his hand moves down, presses hard against his own abdomen – shielded as it is by the plates of his armour, by the heavy welcome weight of Megingjörð about his waist, Mjölnir hung true there. This is something Loki bears alone, no matter how Thor might wish to take it from him so that he might rest.

_I will let no harm come to our child_ , he vows, in silence and in truth, face turned to unfamiliar heavens. Stormclouds roil there now, as known to him as the blood that pulses through muscle and vein. _You need not undo this world, Loki, for we will together make it so that we might live as we will._

_We deserve nothing less, for all that we must give for the happiness of others._

Before he goes to the front, Thor requires little further attendance. He still allows his squire to check over ever buckle and seam of his armour, Þjálfi’s fingers quick and knowing and strong. He has both shield and sword, though all know it is Mjölnir who will be most ready in his hand upon any field.

People come and go all about him but he walks amongst them as if he is the current and they are the frantic fish of this ever-flowing river. Upon the lip of the cliff that overlooks the battleground below, Thor stands tall. His hair has been pulled back, braided by Sif’s grudging skill, though his cape whips about in the rising wind like the scarlet plumage of an ascendant phoenix.

“All know that if your brother is seen, word is to be immediately passed to you.”

Thor turns slightly to face Fandral, though his eyes do not move once from the armies massing upon both sides. “I rather think my brother will make sure of that himself,” he says with wry amusement. But he is still unsettled as he looks out to the stormplain and wonders what it is that Loki expects of him here today. It needles him, to think himself so predictable when perhaps it should not.

It has always been this way, between Odin’s two sons; they have always been as night and day. One golden and stoic, the other silver and mercurial; one a bold warrior striding across a battlefield, the other a sly seiðmaðr slinking in shadows of council halls and throne rooms. Thor has always been content enough to play to Loki’s games, willing to give over a power he had never thought to need to wield himself.

Now, upon the cusp of his first great and true battle, the ending of a war between realms, he feels deep shame in that. In the end he’d never held any true respect for Loki’s considerable influence – for all he’d accepted its existence, Thor knows now it had come of the surety of his own power. He could afford to be magnanimous when he never had to defend his own honour; it is easy to be generous when one has so much given over to him first.

But Loki’s power goes so much deeper. _How often has he influenced my actions?_ The thoughts leaves him both exhilarated and sickened. It is as if they truly are one person. And now he is halved and he wants nothing more than to be whole again.

“So let me go to him, then,” he whispers. “Let this blood be sacrifice enough to turn this world to the next cycle without ending everything first.”

As children, Loki had found great interest in the tactics of battle, if not the actuality of being but one of the cogs operating in that great war machine. While Thor revelled in his training and his lessons, Loki had always found his pleasure in reconstructing great battles with clay and stone and stick figure, animating his tiny golems with seiðr before sending them to war like a great puppetmaster watching over his realm of insects. He would change and alter circumstance to see what might have been, and in that he seemed his most content.

Yet Thor had never been able to aid Loki in such. When he would come home from skirmish and border patrol, from peacekeeping and from raid, Loki would demand he sit down with him and tell him all of the battle so that he might learn more of tactics in true play.

And so rarely could Thor do so. Loki would often grow frustrated, accusing him of being but a trained pig strapped into armour and set loose amongst the truffles to rootle until the ground was too awash with blood for anything more to be found. And yet it was never that. Thor does not think, in battle – or at least, not in the manner of Loki’s quick mercurial mind. He is but muscle and raging blood, the berserker roused and ravenous, never retreating until he is satiated or there is nought left for him to consume.

Words had never been adequate, for that. One afternoon, when he sat in his brother’s solar with his armour all in pieces around him and wishing only for a bath, he had finally shouted at his brother to cease his constant badgering and _let him be_ , for all but moments ago he had been glad to see him after three moons apart from his company. And Loki had shouted back, called him a tongueless thoughtless tool for their father’s too-knowing hand.

“Then look into my head, and see for yourself!”

He had not known then that Loki had such power. Likely Loki had not either, for he did not seem to expect it when he slammed his hands to either side of Thor’s head so that his clever quick mind moved _inside_ him. And it had come again, rising and rushing: the scent of blood, the bite of metal through flesh, the crush of Mjölnir against shield and bone. Thor had tasted again salt and iron on his lips, mixed with the rich copper of the dark elves’ ichorous blood. And then, too: clean plasma of ionised air, rich in the rain that had drenched him from head to foot, the cold water doing nothing to dampen the rich fire of his war-wrought blood.

And Loki had wrenched back from him with a cry, eyes wide, hands shaking, pale as splintered old bone half-risen from ancient battleground. And they had both sprawled there, upon the fine rug woven by their mother’s steady hand, breathing hard and hoarse and heavy. And Thor had never thought he could be so _hard_ , his blood hot and demanding not of war, now, not of death, but of _life_ —

He’d met Loki’s eyes then, but only for a moment. Green and fathomless, they had drawn him in – he’d been _reaching_ for Loki before sense stole him back from sin. And then he had turned, then he had all but run back to his own chambers, summoning a favoured maid; he’d had her three times before he’d even had sanity enough to bathe away the remnants of the battle he’d shared with Loki in that unnatural way.

And he goes to battle now with Loki upon his mind. _Do you wish to see this, brother?_ he thinks even as he raises Mjölnir high above his head, calling down the honourguard of lightning that is his to command even though this is not Asgard. _Can you see this? Will you watch me rend and ravage in the name of the throne I fucked you upon? Will you wait for me, for this time I know what I am fighting for? What waits for me, when I am done with death?_

As children, they had been taught that a good king does not seek out war – but that he is always prepared for it. Loki might have drawn this war to this state, but then Thor is king. And as he splits his first skull, war cry exploding from his throat and thunder rending the sky asunder so that rain falls upon them all, he knows that he was born for such.

But Loki does not come, even as wash upon wave of Vanir warriors crash upon the steadfast shores of Asgard’s finest. And even when the first pause is called, each side withdrawing, Thor’s body thrums with the lack of him.

_Where are you, brother mine?_

Then a kaleidoscope arcs across the grey-torn sky, bright and furious. He turns, looks up, bloodied hand shielding his eyes.

“It’s the Bifröst,” Sif says, one eye swollen and half closed as she narrows both, her dark hair plastered to the fine curve of her skull. Thor says nothing, merely watches until the light dissipates. And then, he too, is gone.

 

*****

 

“How did you come to be here?”

Barton and Stark cannot help but stare at the sight Thor presents, muddied and all but drenched in blood that is far from wholly his own. Romanov displays no apparent discomfort at standing before what must seem to her to be a Viking god seeking his own blood sacrifice. “Heimdall,” she says, short. Thor frowns.

“He was not to bring you to this place, only offer you advice or call one of us to your aid.”

Barton actually chokes on a laugh. “Yeah, he said that. But I think he’s kind of scared of her.”

Her head moves in sharp turn as she eyeballs him. “I asked nicely.”

This time Barton gives Stark a look which the older man returns with a definite helpless shrug. “Yeah. _Definitely_ scared.”

Thor has long since removed his helm, but he holds it still in one hand. Þjálfi scuttles forward to take it, and he releases it with some reluctance; it truly feels worthy only when weighted with the blood of those who have fought valiantly for what they believe merits even their immortal lives. He must bear such weight himself, if he is to be worthy of the throne his father has entrusted him to.

But he pushes his hand back through his tangle of hair, shakes his head. “Truly, my friends – this is not your battle. You needn’t risk yourselves in the name of Asgard.” Mjölnir sparks at his hip, and he can scent warm blood still upon her uru-death head. “You should be with the tesseract.”

Stark frowns. “Yeah, well, about that.”

“What happened?” Sif asks, sharp, and it is Barton who answers with his usual low efficiency.

“It disappeared.”

Snotra stirs from where she sits silent in one corner of her king’s tent, wrapped in heavy furs. “It did what?”

“There was a huge earthquake,” Romanov begins, and Thor’s interruption is sharp.

“How many were injured?”

“None. It was out in the middle of the Pacific, between the coasts of Chile and New Zealand. About as close to the pole of inaccessibility as you can get.” Barton’s hand, fingers wrapped in the minimalistic gauntlets that protect his fingers from the force of his bowstrings. “We’re still on tsunami alert, sure, but it doesn’t seem to have generated even one of those.”

When she gives a low hum of thought, Thor casts a look over at Snotra; she gives a small shrug before adding with thoughtful grace: “That is nowhere near where the tesseract was kept.”

“Sure, but it hit at the exact same time. Real bastard of a coincidence, if you ask me.” And now Barton’s looking at Thor, pale eyes very watchful. “So you really have no idea where Loki’s son was being kept on Earth?”

He jolts. “ _Jörmungandr_?”

“Has Loki been seen on the field?” Romanov asks, and Thor shakes his head.

“No.” He cannot help but look towards the sky, for all it cannot be seen through the thick canvas of his tent. He remembers well the taste of his blood, and the way Loki had stared at the mixture of both that and Thor’s own seed upon his gloved fingers. “I have not felt any great power coming to Vanaheimr.”

“But would you?” Stark asks, and Thor’s laughter is barkingly short.

“Yes, even I. Though it would be felt more strongly by those more inclined to such arts, certainly.”

Snotra is shaking her own head, and Stark is moving uneasily from one armoured foot to the other. “But could it be shielded?”

“Yes.”

Thor is not entirely sure of what Barton has told the others of Loki’s game, though he does not doubt at all that the Lady Romanov is aware of it. But then Stark’s natural suspicions seem to be getting the better of him, and he cannot quite bear to look at any of them. Instead he looks out to the field; they had not pursued the retreat, for all numerous of his commanders had urged it. But until he knows where his brother resides, he will do nothing to charge the camp.

Unless is hand is forced, in which case he will bring down the sky itself to bring his brother home.

But even as his hand tightens about Mjölnir’s damp haft – he will need to change the leathers, these ruined by blood and sweat and other fluids not worth mentioning beyond the field – Stark blinks, and then seems to recall those left standing outside the tent. “Oh, where _are_ my manners – big guy, we’ve got someone we brought along for the ride.”

He doesn’t seem entirely pleased, and Thor frowns as he ducks his head to follow the mortal out of his own tent. “You have another warrior with you?”

“We do,” Romanov interrupts with her usual brisk efficiency, extending a hand. “Thor, this is Captain Steve Rogers. Captain, this is Thor Odinson, King of Asgard.”

The man, a tall and broad blond in blue, white, and red armour that even to Thor’s eye seems somewhat conspicuous for a battlefield, blinks in clear surprise at his first introduction to a blood-soaked Norse god. He draws a long breath, lets it go, and raises one gauntleted hand. “Good to meet you, your…majesty?”

He grasps him back by wrist, feels with some surprise the strength of the mortal’s returned grip. “You might call me Thor, friend Rogers – any who would stand in defence of his realm is fit to be my brother-in-arms.”

“I…see.”

“Don’t mind him; he went into the deep freeze before we even had electricity, let alone aliens dropping in to settle intergalactic disputes on neutral territory,” Stark remarks, his usual easy humour somewhat marred by a sourness Thor has not often heard of him. “Not that this is exactly neutral territory,” he adds, and then frowns. “And hell, they had the Wizard of Oz back then, right? This shouldn’t be so weird. It sure as hell ain’t Kansas, anyway.”

Rogers gives him a _look_. “I’m from New York.”

“Yeah, Coulson showed me pictures of the plaque marking where you were born. Think he might have been making out with it.”

“And we had electricity,” he adds flatly. Stark’s eyebrows rise high.

“And here I thought Dad had hamsters in wheels running for miles to spark up enough juice to grow you.”

The unimpressed look the two exchange is the kind of thing that more often than not comes to blows between two warriors over an Asgardian banqueting table – there is some peculiar history there that Thor understands not. But it is Rogers who makes the call to haul it back to civility. Given his bearing, it doesn’t surprise Thor in the slightest. This is a man who knows war, mortal or otherwise, and there are greater battles to be fought this day.

“What can we do to help?” he asks Thor even as Stark rolls his eyes; Thor’s own eyes move over the group of mortals, seeing only one other vaguely familiar face that is not one to comfort him.

“You do not have the Lady Jane with you.”

“Well, yeah, you don’t exactly bring a tiny cute-as-a-button scientist to a firefight. Even if she does drip verbal acid when provoked.” Still, Stark brightens almost immediately as he eyes alight upon his target. “We’ve got Dr. Banner, though.”

The man indicated by Stark’s generously outstretched hand gives a weak smile in return. There’s a strong spirit beneath it, Thor can feel as much, but still he frowns. “We…I have seen him amongst the others in the Midgardian laboratories, but we have not really become acquainted.”

“Oh, don’t you worry, he’s got some _great_ hidden talents. And a real kicker of a party trick, too. Brings down the house very time.”

“Please don’t,” the man interjects, looking rather like he’s getting a headache for all he looks about the scenery rather like a child given over to a room filled with toys and sweet treats alike. “I’m going to do my very best to keep that one strictly to legend, yeah?”

“Kind of the wrong place for it, if you ask me,” Romanov mutters, and Stark laughs.

“No-one did.” But even as she glares daggers at him and Banner studiously looks everywhere but anyone else’s line of sight, Stark remains resolutely cheerful. “So, what’s going down here? We already on lunch?”

“Something to that effect.” Thor stretches his arms, feels the crack of bone and overworked muscle; the air is cooling already with the approach of evening. “The Vanir withdrew from the field.”

“That…sounds like a good thing to me. But judging by the look on your face, I’m guessing it’s not such hot news?”

Romanov snorts. “Stark, you were a weapons manufacturer. Are you seriously trying to pretend you know nothing of military strategy?”

“They’re clearing the field of their own people for a bastard of a drop,” he says immediately, mobile features somehow managing to be both grave and irritated. “Hey, thank god we turned up to tell Fabio here it’s probably going to be the tesseract!”

“So what do we do, stop, duck, and cover?” That is Barton, who is shielding his eyes and looking out over the field between them; it still moves with people, healers and the injured alike. “Because I call the space under Dr. Banner.”

“Didn’t you grow up during the Cold War? What the hell were they teaching you back then about self-preservation in the event of atomic strike?” Stark asks, incredulous. “Besides, _I’m_ using Dr. Banner as a hulk bodyshield. Science bros, yeah? I totally get first dibs.”

“No-one is using me as a bodyshield.”

“Oh come on, it’ll be a great bonding experience. Friends don’t let friends get flattened by pseudo-thermonuclear pulses, right?”

“ _Stark_.”

Even Thor is surprised by the strength of that single word, spoken in flat command by the Captain he scarcely knows at all. Stark’s habitual smirk seems a little uneasy about its fine edges when he swings around to give the man a mock salute. “Okay, okay – so how much do I need to bribe you to get the vibranium shield, then?” The blue eyes are cool when he inclines his head forward in a disbelieving gesture Thor has seen his father use more than once upon both his own children and recalcitrant advisors alike; Stark throws his hands in the air in disgust. “Oh, right, you’re the all American hero. No minimum bribe level for this one. What are you, made of _plastic_?”

Rogers turns from Stark, his steady gaze now upon Thor alone. “Do you think Loki could have called the tesseract to him?” he asks, blunt. In return Thor nods, tight and taut.

“Yes. I do not know what you understand of what you did to it, but I assume you thought it unlocked something?”

“A quantum state, yes.” That is Banner, his hands locked together in uneasy curves of thought and tension. “But it could have made it liable to additional movement, I just don’t know. I understand science, mostly; sorcery’s all a bit new to me.”

“My father would have known,” Thor murmurs, more to himself than the mortals; Stark snorts all the same.

“Yeah, but your dad’s sleeping through the war.”

“He never mentioned this possibility,” he murmurs again, and then looks up with sharp eyes that rake over them all. From the way they all stiffen, some more than others, they are remembering again that he is all but a god, covered in the blood of those who are far closer to his divine limits than they will ever be. “Whatever Loki has chosen to do, it is not without purpose.”

“Malice? Mischief? How about those?”

“It cannot be put past him,” he admits, and then shakes off distrust. He can feel Barton’s watchful gaze, and he knows that whatever it is that Loki plans, he will not doubt him again. “So, are there those of you who wish to accompany the Einherjar and our warriors upon the field when next we engage? For it is likely there will be an exchange of envoys—”

The explosion sends them all to their knees, Stark scrambling towards Banner; somewhat to Thor’s surprise, rather than using the poor man as the shield he and Barton had argued over, Stark appears to be shielding the man instead with his own armoured body. Thor himself is on his feet immediately, and shouts rise over the entire camp as warriors scramble to their arms. Barton is already at his side, summoned as quickly as Huginn or Muninn to the Allfather’s shoulders, sharp eyes raking over the field below.

“Oh, _God_ ,” Banner mutters, pushing out from under Stark and moving over to where Thor and Barton stand; he’s pulling glasses, miraculously intact, from the pocket of his shirt as he looks down to where the field is being fled by all those able to do so. “This is not what I signed up for.”

“Hey, look on the bright side – I think we found Waldo,” Stark offers, slapping the man on the back hard enough to make him stagger. And then he frowns. “…or the steaming crater where Waldo used to be, at least.”

Seiðr has never been Thor’s speciality, and nor shall it ever be. But he does not doubt at all the source of the explosion, or the blue-bright shimmer that hangs like a veil between the opposing fronts. He can all but taste Loki upon the air, his presence winding about soul and spirit like a siren call. “Dr. Banner,” he says, voice thick and low pulse, “you will come with me now.”

Stark’s eyes widen almost comically in sudden alarm. “Wait, Thor, that is _not_ a good id—”

But Mjölnir is already spinning to the momentum of movement and seiðr alike that will grant Thor ability enough to take to the air. Banner barely has moment enough to grasp haphazardly to any sort of anchor and then they are hurtling from the cliff to the field below. The mortal staggers as they hit the ground with a thump that rattles even Thor’s immortal form, but he pays him only the briefest heed as he strides forward to where the tesseract has embedded itself into the very land of Vanaheimr.

It seems almost innocuous where it lies now, as if its very arrival had not flattened half the forest around the field. It gleams and it glows, its light unfurled like the petals of a fresh-blooming flower just turning its face to the sun. Yet Thor draws near, and it does not protest; it seems a low hum, richer and more promising than that of its quiescent state. Thor knows this is but the beginning. He can feel it in his bones, like a world poised upon the brink of every change.

“Ragnarök,” he whispers, and the mortal gives a low chuckle of no humour whatsoever as he inches closer himself, eyes upon the tesseract; the blue sheen over the colourless lenses of his glasses shields his expression.

“Probably not wrong there,” Banner mutters, leaning as close as it seems he will dare. “It’s going to go critical unless that reaction’s halted pretty damn soon.”

“Which you will not, _cannot_ do.” That voice will never not be known to him. Thor turns from the tesseract with such swiftness he must regain his balance with one hand upon the ground; the pulse of the tesseract is like a heartbeat through the land itself. As he pushes upward Loki takes another step closer, a crazed look in his eyes. “Hello, _brother_.”

Yet he sounds conversational, for all his slim body seems to vibrate with the same half-tempered energy of the tesseract itself. Unknowing of what stage they play upon now, Thor takes a half-meant step sideways, keeps himself between Loki and Banner. “What is the meaning of this?” he asks, the gleam of the blue-bight tesseract like a sheen over his brother’s eyes. “Did you call the tesseract here? Why would you do such a thing?”

“Oh, it’s but a little game of mine,” he says, nonchalant enough even as he turns sharp eyes upon what he can see of Banner behind Thor’s back. “And who is this new pet of yours? He smells…mortal.” And then his brow furrows, eyes narrowing. “Almost.”

They have no audience that Thor can see, save for the mortal scientist. But Loki’s every move is deliberate, his gaze relentless, and he can see that this will not end quietly. “What have you done to the tesseract?” he asks, finally, and Loki waves a dismissive hand with fingers all but sparking with half-held silver seiðr. The air is rich, ionised, thick enough almost to choke on.

“Oh, this and that.” His smile is indolent, bordering on the cruel; it brings to mind uncomfortable recollection of a tent and air heavy with incense and poisoned word. “It is nothing _you_ would understand.”

They are both too close to the tesseract, he thinks oddly. And he is indeed beginning to regret having brought the mortal down here, for all some part of him had hoped this would bring Loki to him. “Brother, what game are we playing here?”

“No game,” he says, opening his eyes wide to perfect innocent roundness. But the accompanying smile has a cruel hint to it that only deepens as he goes on. “Or perhaps it is _end_ game. I’m not actually sure which you’d prefer to call it.”

The words of Sif ring harsh and heavy in his ears, like the clangour of bells rung to signal the death of a king. Drawing a deep breath, Thor steels his shoulders and holds his head high. They are far from the others, both of them here before the enemy lines, deep in no man’s land. Whatever happens next, it deserves only to be between them.

“Thor, we don’t have a lot of time here,” Banner says, sudden and urgent. “I don’t know what’s been done to it, but the locks on its power…they’re _unlocked_. I’ve never seen it in this state. Hell, I don’t think anyone has.”

“You have a good eye there,” Loki says, lazy as a cat batting at a mouse with one paw. “I don’t believe we’ve met?”

“Probably for the best,” Banner returns with an evenness that surprises Thor. “I mean, I’m a freelancer myself, but even I know it’s no good talking to those who look to have gone over to the rival company.”

“Oh, what makes you say that?” And Loki smiles, all serpentine coil and half-concealed fang. “I could be doing this for the good of everybody.”

“Yeah, but things are feeling a little hostile here to me.” He moves, uncomfortable beneath Loki’s unblinking gaze. “And I can feel the land, and sure I’m not a local, but it doesn’t feel _right_.”

“Why does everyone expect betrayal of me? Maybe I plan to destroy Vanaheimr, wipe from the World Tree the realm that would dare lay hands upon my royal person.” And he smiles, bright despite the fact it is also harsh and cool. “Did you think of that, half-mortal thing that you are?”

“Funny how they withdrew to let you do this, then,” the scientist answers, just as cool as the seiðmaðr before him. And then Loki’s looking up and smiling as the Man of Iron lands at their side; from the expression upon his face when the faceplate flips up, Thor suspects he has heard more of the conversation than mortal airs ought to account for.

“Hey, tall, dark, and crazy,” Stark says, quick mind immediately reaching out to tug hard upon the tension strung out between them all like a tangled spider’s web. “Long time no see. So what’s up in crazytown?”

“Crazytown?”

“Well, come on – this all seems a little…horrible, right, Bruce?” he remarks, looking about. And then he turns back to Loki, eyes hard and searching. “As in, your king’s looking like he’d as soon as punt you through a wall as hug you, and hey. God of Mischief and Chaos. This…all seems a little inevitable to me.”

“Oh?”

“Oh.”

Despite his languid demeanour, Loki seems almost offended by Stark’s wariness. “And here I thought we saw eye to eye, you and me.”

“On how to best piss off Fury, sure. But that doesn’t include blowing up Midgard. That kind of pisses me off too. Kind of like pissing in your own shoes, as it were.”

He gives him a little half-ducked smile, grinning up at the mortal from beneath his brow like a mischievous child. “Oh, this isn’t going to blow up _Midgard_ ,” he titters. “Do think a little bigger than that.”

Stark has also moved rather close to Banner, Thor notes; but his own mind is a minefield that he must delicately peruse for thought rather than explosive emotion as Stark frowns over at the coiled whip of malice that his brother has become. “Then what is it going to do?”

“Do you know how Asgard assures her victories stay that way, long past the end of any war?” Loki asks, almost conversational. “She does win them fair and square, I shall grant her that. But then she never allows them to fight again. Take Jötunheimr, for example. A fair fight it might have been, a thousand years ago – the mighty Jötnar and the proud Aesir. But then they took the Casket of Ancient Winters, rendering the land fallow and the people half-crippled. Proud warriors they remained, certainly, but with little enough to be proud of. They were rendered little more than arena sport, in the end.” The hard eyes turn upon Thor, and when he speaks next his voice is harsh in a way that his melodious tones are ill-suited to. “Just monsters to be slaughtered at the whims of children.”

“And they blinded us,” comes another voice, slow and careful. “The seers of Vanaheimr, the mothers.” She takes a closer step, her low hair a tumbling waterfall of bright colour about slim shoulders. “Our prophecy, our easy fertility,” she goes on, and gives a sharp laugh. “For all your brother’s betrayals, you do not know what dark arts _I_ sank to in order to conceive our salvation.”

Thor is wordless as the truth is revealed to his eyes: Nerþuz has been wearing a glamour of her own. One hand rests now over her very swollen belly, each step careful through the blood-streaked mud. The green dress she wears ripples about her like deep uneasy sea, its loose weave doing nothing to disguise the fact she must be very close to term.

“You are with child,” Thor says, dull. And she smiles, fleetingly peaceful in herself.

“Yes. A daughter.” The smile turns hard as a curved blooded blade. “My brother’s daughter.”

“Your brother’s,” he says, flat; he can feel Loki’s eyes upon him, but he looks nowhere else but at the self-crowned Vanir queen.

“No-one will doubt her claim to Vanaheimr’s throne, for all mine is tenuous enough. She is my brother’s only surviving get.” And then she blinks, brilliant in her wide-eyed innocence. “And she will marry _your_ son, the sole heir to Asgard’s throne – the only get you will ever have, for you shall not survive this day.”

Thor’s smile is as brittle as the tension stretched from one end of no man’s land to the other. “Is this something else you have seen in your great prophecy?”

If not for the low whistle that mars the air between them there, Thor might have forgotten entirely that the mortals remain. “Uh – who exactly is _that_?” Starks says, but Thor does not even look to him once when he replies.

“I suggest you leave this matter to my brother and me.”

“Your…right. _Right_.” And he hears the scientist make a startled noise as Stark presumably grabs him. “Bruce, we’re out,” he says, but even Thor can hear the low mutter of: “I thought this was _Norse_ mythology, not _Greek_.”

There is a pulse of heated air as the mortals rise, spiral back to the Aesir encampment. But Thor’s attention has moved to his brother alone, his heart a tangled throbbing mass of muscle and hurt as he stares. Barton had spoken of faith; their father had spoken of Loki’s need to hold his salvation in his own hands. And Thor’s mouth is dry as the desert of his soul when he forces himself to speak.

“Loki.” In return Loki merely shrugs, forcing him to speak further though he knows not what this is. “Loki, what do you want of me?”

“Nerþuz will let you retreat, even now.” One hand rises, encompasses what seems to be the realm entire. “The tesseract’s power will expand over all of Vanaheimr in very short time. But it is keyed to recognise those who are sympathetic to her cause, and those who are not.” When he looks back to Thor, his eyebrow is arched high. “Think of it, oh King of Asgard: your army and your people and _you_. All gone, and for what?”

Thor takes a shuddering breath, stares at his brother. It is so easy to keep the faith when Loki is close against him, eyes bright with mischief and his body all warm familiarity. This cold creature seems the monster he tried to name himself in their father’s vault, dead-eyed and all casual cruelty. “This was your plan all along,” he says, and Loki blinks as if surprised.

“Oh, but of course.” Taking a step closer, he gives a sigh of pleasure that seems almost post-coital, eyes moving to where the tesseract pulses like an exposed heart. “Only the blood of the king can move such items when the Allfather has left them somewhere,” he says, soft, “and your trust in me has always been so _very_ dear to my heart.”

“Enough of your games, Loki.” Nerþuz’s arms wrap about her middle, eyes very cold. “I will not wait for the spell to take him. I would see him dead myself.”

“No.” Loki’s sharp answer makes her eyes widen, and Thor can feel the air charge; it seems Nerþuz is a powerful seiðkona in her own right. But Loki glares at her, his own slim form all but pulsing with light; it makes Thor despair, for he had known himself that rising power once before in Vanaheimr. When it had been for him, rather than against.

_(The branches of Yggdrasil bind us always together_ – _and one can never be sure what the leaves conceal in the canopy far overhead…or what the dirt shields beneath our feet, where the roots grow strong and thick and true_.)

“It is not to you, to end my brother.” And Thor is lost in the memory of how it had been to join with his brother in sense both physical and spiritual when Loki darts forward, drives him down to one knee with hands upon great shoulders. He cannot look up before Loki himself jerks his chin up; those cold eyes again knife deep. “That is something for my pleasure alone,” he says, and Nerþuz gives a high strange laugh like a girl startled from her weaving.

“You wish to be known as kinslayer?”

“We share no blood,” Loki says, eyes searching Thor’s as his brother remains still beneath his gasp. And Nerþuz frowns.

“But the bond of brotherhood is strong between you both.”

“You laid your own brother’s throat wide open in a smile while you kissed higher lips,” Loki said, careless. “What care you, if I bear the same burden with willing ease?”

And Thor laughs; even he knows such thing will never be borne easy upon these slim shoulders. “Loki. It should not end this way. Not between us.” The words are harsh upon his lips, forced from deep in the burning hollow of his chest. “ _Do not lie to me_. Not in this. There is no need for lies, not when we might do this together.”

“There is nothing I would do with you again, Odinson.” And his laughter is high, bitter as the Jötunn blood they do not share. “But then how else should it end? It is always your way to break, to take hammer to that which you cannot fix otherwise. Your solution is first always to destroy, in order to have what remains cleave to your will without question.”

And then Loki leans close, lips against his ear. “But let me tell you now, should you take Mjölnir to the tesseract, all of reality itself will suffer for your foolishness. Her power and such potential…she is both death and life, but you know only how to break and not to build.

“If you wish to stop me, you would have to bring Mjölnir down upon my head. But even you are not so craven as all that. Our father could do it. He has known me for the monster I am since he stole me from the temple.

“So think on it, then: why does not _he_ do this? Because he needs you to learn. But then you never could be taught. One small sacrifice is all that is needed and yet you would never make it.”

And he draws back, thrusting Thor backward even as Sif’s word’s ring bright and too loud in his ears.

_(“I would do it for you… If you would but ask.”)_

“Sentiment makes you weak,” Loki sighs, and he sounds almost paternal in his disappointment. “Here I stand before you, and you would flinch away from the killing blow.”

“I will not fight you, brother.”

“Why not?” He seems genuinely confused. “I would fight _you_.”

“Liar.”

Loki blinks. “Well, yes, I am good with such manner of things.”

And on his knees though he remains, Thor turns his head to the damned queen. “Nerþuz.”

She smiles brightly, as if they are but king and queen speaking as equals across a diplomatic forum. “Yes, Thor?”

“Think what you will of his loyalties and his betrayals,” he says, thick, “but no matter what he tells himself, he’s lying to himself as much as to you. No matter what he does here today, it changes not at all the truth. He is mine, and he always will be.”

“Oh, yes, yes, I know _that_ ,” she says, flapping one hand at him even as the other remains upon her high belly. “But if he comes to you now, then what manner of life will you give him, this seiðmaðr brother you have defiled yet further still? What is there for him in Asgard, but the shameful place as monstrous concubine in your whore’s bed?” And she laughs, bright and sure. “If he stays at my side, he can be as much a king as I am a queen, for my court cares not for such matters – and once we have my kingdom, perhaps we’ll take the one that might be his by birth, too.” And she giggles again, something sinister in its lightness this time. “And in the end Asgard shall be the gift for our children both.”

“He is not yours.”

And Loki snorts. “I give myself where I will.”

Even when he turns to Nerþuz, even when she raises one hand to his cheek, Thor does not expect it. He can barely recognise the sight before his eyes when they lean close together, lying lips locked together in a kiss that is more transaction than passion, but seemingly true enough for all that.

But the agony in his heart is agonised fact. “You are _lying_ ,” he says all the same, and Loki turns from Nerþuz with a sigh, one arm still locked about her thickened waist.

“I am _always_ lying, Thor,” he says, almost sounding to be exasperated with all of this. “But my child deserves to grow to lies of its own.” His expression hardens, and again his whole body seems to pulse with seiðr in tune with the strengthening melody of the tesseract’s own accumulating strength. “Whereas I believe you’ve had more than your fair share.”

“You will lose this war,” Thor says to the queen, but without heat; Nerþuz raises an eyebrow.

“Will I really?”

“Your armies will fall to the Aesir and her allies,” he says, though his doubt is heavy upon them all. “You cannot unleash the full power of the tesseract without destroying everything, no matter what Loki tells you.”

“I’m willing to take that risk,” she says, almost cheerful. “Because I protect what I love at any cost. I was not made to be queen, and I care nothing for the people of this realm. But then…perhaps _you_ can you say the same, for all you call yourself a divine hero.”

Thor stares at her, silent.

“Because what kind of king are you?” she asks, as if genuinely puzzled even as she curls in closer to Loki’s willing body. “Because you want it, in your heart – you say you fight for Asgard, but in the end you would let entire worlds burn just because you cannot have what you want, wouldn’t you?” And then she laughs again, tongue tracing the soft curve of her lower lip. “But then perhaps not. Perhaps that is why Loki leaves you, because you would _never_ let reality tear itself asunder and perhaps never be remade anew simply because your brother chose a truer love than yours.”

“Your so-called love is all about what he can do for you,” he snaps back with sudden roused fury; her amusement only grows all the further.

“Do you truly believe yours was any more noble?” She answers her own question, turned bitter again. “Noooo, because then you are the same as my brother. Creatures of your ilk can only love us for what we represent to you. The younger. The lesser.” And her scowl is a terrible thing, her teeth sharp against rose-coloured lips. “But how easy you take all we have to offers when we lift our skirts or shirts for your stupid great swords and hammers!”

Loki holds her closer yet, halting her tirade; his own eyes hold ugly fury. “And perhaps I prefer it this way,” he says, idle enough. “Perhaps it is better to know that I am being used, rather than being unwitting victim of false sentiment and pretended emotion.” But his eyes have narrowed again and his fingers dig deep into soft skin. “Perhaps the sweeter lie is the one that never pretends to be the truth.”

“What do you _want_ from me, Loki?”

As if to compound Thor’s despair, one long fingered hand moves to lie defensive over his belly. “I already have it.”

And Thor wants to laugh, wants to scream, wants to call down the storm and destroy everything he once thought he knew. “So it’s true, then? All you wanted was my child?”

Loki wrenches free of Nerþuz, striding across the mud to drive one finger hard against his brother’s chest. “What else have you for me, than pretended love and affection like scraps thrown to the dogs?” he demands, eyes wild as any rabid animal’s. “Perhaps when we were children, it was something real. But then you grew up. Then you stopped believing.”

“Believing in _what_?”

“Me!” And he shrieks his laughter to the storm-torn sky high above their heads. “The younger brother who didn’t need to be fierce warrior to be worthy of his place at your side. As your _equal_.” And now Loki sneers into his face. “You outstripped me in everything and it wasn’t even that you didn’t care. You took pleasure in it. You could best forty men in the training pit and it meant nothing until your friends laughed at the one jest you made of my seiðr.”

Thor’s own laughter is a bitter twist of the thickened air between them. “That is not how it was. You remember it wrongly.”

The blow comes out of nowhere, drives him to his knees. And then Loki is shoving him back, even as Thor struggles to his feet; he is _ungodly_ strong in this, and he hazily remembers Loki’s words of how the child’s presence strengthens everything of him.

“No. _You_ remember it wrongly – everything in your memory is tainted and false.” Loki shoves him hard again, this time with a foot to his breastbone. Thor falls back, the thrum of the tesseract rich song even through the shield of his armour. And then Loki is straddling him, knees bracketing his ribcage, sit bones pressed down hard on his own pelvis.

“Loki—”

This time he _slaps_ , an open-handed blow that rings through Thor’s head entire; when he looks up, Loki’s face is close, his entire body hunched over his brother’s like a striking snake as his fingers fist into his collar and wrench him upwards. “Because the golden son can never be petty or cruel or vain,” he hisses, mocking and furious. “But that’s the lie – because you are _all_ these things, Odinson, and still more.” Loki lets go and Thor’s head strikes the resonating ground with a thump that sends a discordant note through his body entire. And Loki is laughing again, hips grinding in harsh pressure. “You are as great a fool as ever might sit upon the throne of gilded rotting Asgard, puppet of the failing Allfather and his need to cling to the remains of a false paradise that is already but ashes in the mouths of the blind corpses who sup upon blood and flesh at their great tables.”

The mocking, jeering face is close again to his for all it seems a mask. Each word hits like a thrown knife, digging beneath his skin, cutting deep, scarring in places slow to heal. And it is raining, Thor notes dimly. He can hear the hiss of evaporated water rising from the tesseract, can taste ozone on his tongue, bitter as it is familiar. “Which is the lie?” he asks, hoarse; his voice is echoed by the low warning of distant brontide. And Loki shifts upon him,  slim body alive with his own seiðr.

“Everything is a lie,” he says, and with one long finger pressed to his lips he seems more thoughtful than the creature of wrath he had been but a moment ago. And then he turns cold eyes down again, hands now clenched about the strong muscles of his brother’s upper arms. “We all see things differently. There is no universal truth. All is but a great web of lies that will only but ensnare us all.”

Thor’s lips crack when he smiles, bitter and bloodied. “I never lied when I said I loved you.”

“To yourself, or to me?” And Loki frowns, fire dancing in his eyes. “Perhaps you even believe that. Because that would be the end of you, wouldn’t it. Realising that you are no better than I, that you are as twisted and cruel a thing as I am.” And now he leans close again, whispering against his lips in the manner of a lover: “That I am not your shadow, but rather your equal in darkness and in filth. You, who would unman your own brother and call it love, who would disinherit him by planting your own seed in his belly—”

Thor has him by the hips, rolls them both over until Loki is pressed deep into the dirt by his greater weight, his wild snarled hair dripping filthy water into his wide eyes. And he has him by the shoulders now, slamming Loki’s head into the soft squelch of the mud beneath. “ _Stop_!”

And Loki laughs, high and brittle. “No,” he says. “No! You cannot stop it. It is too late.” His mouth is wide and his teeth are streaked with blood likely not his own when he grimaces rather than grins. “This is where it all begins, Odinson,” he says, his hands insistent claws in his shoulders as he pulls Thor down upon him. “This is the end.”

Thor shudders against him. He knows he should rise; for all the glamour Loki wears Thor can still feel the babe between them, restless half-grown spirit twisting upon the string of its own precarious fate. “No,” he whispers, and Loki’s legs rise, ankles locking as thighs bracket hips, the jerk of his hips but cruel parody of times far more loving than this.

“No?”

Loki’s innocent query hurts more than any fierce fury. “ _I love you_ ,” he hisses, as if that changes anything; it only brings fresh madness to Loki’s eyes.

“Sentiment is a fool’s crutch!” he chortles. “Only the weak believe in love – and surely _you_ of all people understand that the strong survive and the weak just die.”

The rain is harsh and heavy over his back, yet it cannot wash any of the blood he bears upon brow and hand alike. His shoulders are heavy as is the weight of his guilt and body upon his brother’s half-illusionary form, the brother whose eyes he cannot bear to meet. Barton is not here to offer his watchful thought. This is Thor’s trial alone. And he is failing, he thinks in despair; he had promised always to have faith in Loki, but in this…if he has been the fool so many have named him, Loki himself amongst them…

The song of the tesseract is strong in this land, watchful and waiting.

“Go home, Odinson. Go home and wait to die.” Loki is almost kind as he arches up, shoves Thor back. “This is no world for you. We have no need of heroes, false and true alike.”

The melody of those words is like the raindrops upon his skin, cool and familiar.

“We will take this tree up by its roots and pound its false fruit into the dirt.” Loki is on his feet, and the mud squelches unhappily as he turns, begins to walk away. “And it will bloom again with the blood we give it, the soil rich with flesh and bone of the unworthy dead.” And he turns his face to the sky, rain coursing over the high pale bones of his hollowed cheeks. “It is your child too, but in the end he will be only mine.”

Thor chokes, and Loki looks back.

“Just lie down and die,” he advises, simple as he returns to stand at Nerþuz’s watchful side. “You can’t fight me. Not like this.” And then he laughs, short and almost sorrowing. “And perhaps this was never a fair battle – for you never could kill me. False fool love or no, you still see me as the child who worshipped you for the golden shining prince you never ever were.” And there is definite sorrow in his voice now when he whispers, fury or no: “You say I lie to _you_? Vainglorious fool. I always lied to myself first.”

Thor turns away, blinded – but then the bright glare of the tesseract awaits him. And Mjölnir trembles in his hand, sudden wakeful desperation. She had never once called to him while Loki had pushed and pulled and bruised and battled. But as he stares at the damned artefact of their father’s treasure vault, hidden away so long ago, she begins a low anacrusis that has him closing his eyes even though he cannot deny the song she is yet to sing.

“You could never change me,” Loki whispers to his shuddering back. “This world has twisted me beyond even your clumsy salvation. Nothing will ever be as you would wish it. It is over. It is done. Let it end here.”

And Thor keeps his eyes tight closed even though that does nothing to end the sound of Loki’s words. But then that does not matter. He has heard all that he needs. He knows what they all need now.

_An ending_.

He takes one step forward, and Loki’s mockery rises high above even the storm roiling overhead.

“You never would, you coward!”

He takes the second step, and Loki’s voice takes on sudden jeering surprise.

“Oh, then perhaps you _would_ , you craven fool.”

When the next step makes three the heavy fall echoes the weight of his brother’s accusation.

“Will you do it, then? Truly? Will your idiocy let you do this after all? Have you finally realised that you are not the golden hero you always believed?”

Four steps, and he falters.

“Oh, is this then finally the blót you would willingly lay upon Asgard’s table in order to stop your brother’s madness? Will the Allfather willingly choke down this offering you make to those even more divine than you?”

And broken laughter spirals higher with the fifth step’s renewed assurance.

“So, then, make your sacrifice to your betters! Pretend with the death of everything to be the noble hero you never were in life!”

Six steps, and he knows he cannot turn back, cannot bear to see the madness writ upon his brother’s beloved face.

“Do it.”

That makes seven, and Loki shrieks.

“ _Do it_!”

Eight, and he will never falter again even as Nerþuz’s nerve shatters like so much thin ice and her voice spirals up to the uncaring heavens.

“You fool, what are you _doing_?”

Nine steps are taken and Mjölnir is raised high over his head. Nerþuz is screaming and Loki is laughing and it doesn’t matter the tesseract is before him and if he brings Mjölnir down upon her the worlds will unravel but there are others who can rework the pattern, excise from it this warped tangle and there are those who are strong and sure enough to make the next world so that this will never happen again—

“ _Thor_!”

Even now, he cannot help but turn back to the brother he had once loved so well, loves even now in this world that cannot ever be what they need. And Loki has doubled over; even as Thor watches, motionless and bloodied, a high scream rips from his throat.

The agony of it feels dulled against his hardened heart, his voice thick rumble across the space left between them. “Your lies will not fool me now, trickster. If you would ruin the world for your own ends, then I will end it first. I will kill it clean and true.”

“Oh, but I only ever lied to you for your own good,” he sneers, “stupid lumbering fool that you always were, and always ever will be! And so what altar will you make this sacrifice upon, then? Whose blood will you sacrifice if not the sap of the World Tree itself?”

The words knife through him like a dagger, sharpened with the memory of gloved hands upon his cock but less than a day ago. And his own hands are shaking even as he wraps both about Mjölnir and raises her high one last time. Nerþuz stumbles forward now, fire flying from her hands. But it is of no matter to him; there is but one consequence left to all this. Thor is driven to the tesseract, and he is close. In this they will all find the end of all things, and they will find it together.

_I am sorry, Father. I only wanted…I just **wanted**._

Yet there is no conviction, not even now; he cannot bring her down without one final look back. Loki is on his knees, arms curled protective about his abdomen, bent almost entirely double though his face remains upturned. He is both wide-eyed and pale, and his smile is stitched of tears and amusement alike as he finally gives up the lie he has clung to for far too long.

“Oh, _Thor_ ,” he murmurs, and Thor knows the words more by shape than sound, “how many times must you fall for this?”

In that sudden despair Thor’s hand jolts as if the lightning has been called down from the heavens by a will not his own, and beneath his feet the land itself seems to sigh; it shifts, too, an ocean that he walks upon like a draugr whose funeral longboat has not yet burned to ember and ash.

And then he looks to the blaze of the tesseract, silver-shot blue as it lies in the land. His eyes burn, and his heart skips even as his lips curve upward in sudden strange smile. Loki has so often named him a fool. But in this, finally, he understands why he was born to be such, over and over again.

_(“It will recognise you, and your need.”)_

“I suppose I’ll keep falling for it until you know just how much I need _you_ ,” he whispers, and reaches for the tesseract with open hand. Then it feels as though it reaches for _him_ , and Mjölnir falls from his other hand and the world turns blue, brighter _brighter_ blue, until all is white, and all is gone.

And Thor is gone with it, that same small secret smile on his face all the while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can I just say that the title of this chapter amused me greatly? I always borrow lines from _The Waste Land_ for that purpose, but this one is...particularly apt. ~~Oh _Thor_ , that poor bloody sod.~~ Also, there's...something of an injoke in this chapter. There are several influences who often pop up in my writing; Eliot is one of them, but another of them makes a sly little cameo here. I'll give you a cookie if you spot it. ^_~


	13. I Had Not Thought Death Had Undone So Many

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, it's been a couple of weeks again -- I am sorry for the delay. And there are definitely moments in which I wonder if anyone is even still reading, considering I seem to have lost complete control of this fic. But then...I've had a vicious couple of weeks in terms of fading mental health, but in an odd way this chapter actually...well. I _like_ it. Which probably means it's terrible, but after all that's happened I actually got a lot of pleasure out of writing it, and I can only hope those of you who are still with me now find the same sort of happiness in reading it.  <3
> 
> Thank you for being here. :)
> 
> (Incidentally, the mismatched tenses in the first section are an intentional stylistic choice. In case you start reading and think I was drunk. Um. ^_^)

_It is a dream that comes to him here, in this place – no, a_ memory _. It tastes like winter upon his tongue, crisp and cool. There is no wind, there is no storm, only snow and clear pure white._

_But then he opens his eyes, opens his mind, and everything is changed. Everything is different again. But he knows this place. He knows it too well: this place where he thought things had begun, but in truth where they had but come to a head._

_Loki stood silent, dressed in the ruins of his hunting garb, fashioned like a creature of cold marble warped to pleasing form by the hands of a master artisan. But his hands were easy by his sides, no tension or trepidation to him at all as his chin tilted upward so he might look down his nose at the Vanir seiðmaðr who had been the centre of all this._

_Thor remembers him well; he remembers, too, the great pleasure he had taken in raising Mjölnir with Loki’s hand wrapped about his own – and then, too, the great joy that had thundered through their bodies both when together they had brought her down to pound skull and the brain within until all became little more than white-speckled red crush. But at this time the seiðmaðr was still whole, the frightful pale of his eyes sallow against the pale skin, all long bone and easy arrogance. His hair had been pulled back in a long braid the colour of bark, a long line down his spine, treacherous liar’s body clad all in white._

_That creature, dead all this time now, stood then before Loki with his hands loosely held before his hips. The ravenous pull of his eyes seemed to encourage Loki closer, to the unseen teeth that lurked behind his smile; Loki, predictably, stood as ever just out of reach, skirting the edge of shadow and light, both and neither together._

_“Will it take as long as you predicted?” he asked at last, voice melodious low hum; it was one given over well to chant and incantation. It had little effect on his brother, who merely tilted his head with expressionless contemplation._

_“It is hard to say, with my brother.”_

_One edge of his lips curved upward. “He is not your brother.”_

_Thor’s own heartbeat quickens, fingers clawing into rapid fists; this is not what he wants to see, this is not what he has come for. But for all Loki had spoken of the tesseract as a vessel of change, where time can be undone and rewoven anew, Thor knows that such is not his gift. Mjölnir is all low hum at his hip and he coaxes his fingers to relax as Loki’s slim shoulders moved in easy acknowledgement, his previous self walking again a past already said and done._

_“He believes it so, and believe me that is but to our advantage.” Loki had ever seemed to glide from place to place, the easy passage of serpent over sand as he moved to lay one hand upon the great altar. They played at rune-casting there, though in motion rather than actuality; his eyes were shuttered from the view of seiðmaðr and brother both. “His devotion is what will draw him to me,” he murmured, and a frown moved the Vanir’s lips downward._

_“Yes,” he said, soured and sly alike, “but as I understand such matters, your petty Asgardian sensibilities will not allow for the congress of even men together, let alone siblings.”_

_“Men do what men will do when the situation calls for it. Women, too, will go where their hearts lead them.”_

_Something very like surprise quirked the Vanir’s eyebrow upward, even as Thor’s abdomen tightens as if he has been kicked low and hard. “And so shall we speak of love?” The words were idle, but the mockery etched itself deeper yet. “I do not think it is_ love _that will give us this child.”_

_“You should not underestimate the use of love in such matters.”_

_The Vanir hummed, soft and thoughtful. “But it is a false love,” he observed – and it is that cavalier tone that hits Thor hardest, even moreso than the quiet contemplation of his brother at rest beside the altar where they both gave of love truer than either had ever understood. But his opened mouth gives no sound; his thrust forward foot makes no impact upon cracked and ruined marble. He can only watch. What’s said is said, and this is the past._

But the tesseract—

_“Everything he loves in you has been fashioned of a lie.” The Vanir spoke the truth as Loki had given it, Thor thinks, and it is bitter gall that rises in his own throat as the man went relentlessly on. “He believes you his brother – and in this, when he rescues you, when he gives you his seed, it will be to liberate that which never existed.”_

_Loki raised an eyebrow, unmoved by such goading. “What care you for the state of my heart?”_

_The Vanir had been quick. Thor remembers it well, the way he had ducked and dodged, his body alight with seiðr in the moments before Mjölnir had crushed his kneecaps to bone-splinter and shard. And he moved swift then too, coming to stand before Loki with mocking ease. “Never lose sight of what you are, little Jötunn lostling.” The crooned words could be mistaken for gentle, kindly as a father figure borrowed and bright. One hand lay upon his brother’s cheek like comfort, and Thor’s own skin twists as his gut turns, wishing to do nothing more than stride forth and strike it away._

Wait.

_“He will not want you when he knows what you are,” the Vanir whispered, pale eyes like stagnant water. “Take what you will, and give nothing back.”_

_Loki snorted; Thor has seen that expression many a time when some fool tutor had thought to teach him something he had long since figured for himself. “Is that not why I am here?”_

_“Mmm,” he agreed, light as ice. “But he is not ready. We need more time.”_

_It appeared his brother saw no need to deny the truth of that. But his gaze turned hard when he looked about the room, one hand moving to smooth the ruin of his surcoat. “I would have aid for those who accompanied me,” he said, clipped and cold; Thor jerks with the memory of old belief, even as Loki’s fierce glare moved to cut through the Vanir. “There was no need to harm them as you did.”_

_Yet he only bore amusement upon his long features. “They seem fine.”_

_“One is not.”_

_And Thor again tastes the bitter fear he had known in those days, watching as Volstagg had slipped deeper into delirium and silent half-healing. “Why the care for those who have never appreciated truly what it is that you are?”_

_The amusement of the Vanir thinned Loki’s lips, his arms now crossed tight over his chest. “Give me what I need to give them succour in their captivity.”_

_It was the imperious demand of a prince, one Thor himself finds hard to deny even though he is the elder of them. The Vanir was unmoved. “What difference does it make?”_

_“They will wonder what I do, when I am gone.” And he snorted again, bitter. “This shall give them excuse enough.”_

_“That you give of yourself so that their suffering might be lessened?” Curiosity burned like a brand. “Who would believe such of the Liesmith of Glaðsheimr?”_

_If it hurt him, Loki displayed nothing of it. “It will give my brother all the more desire to protect me.”_

_“Perhaps.” The eyes narrow. “But it will not be given freely, will it?”_

_The twist of Loki’s lips said he was quick to perceive the offered compromise. “You wish for the illusion of trade to be real?”_

_“It will make it easier for them to believe, will it not?”_

_His eyes fell closed, even as his hands rose to his collar; Thor wants to scream, to dart forward and stop this ever from happening. The power of that thrums through his hands, sings through his veins._

I could do it. I could!

_“I shall warn you, then, that this is no game to be played lightly,” Loki said, soft, and the Vanir’s laugh beat in low bass to match._

_“You are no pawn to be moved without your will.” His hand closed hard over the exposed skin his brother offered. “Do not deny it, false Aesir prince. You want this.”_

_Loki’s eyebrow arched. “Oh, do I?”_

_The smile burned, and Thor’s heart aches; his vision is limned with white-hot blue, the vision wavering upon its terminal edges in his mind. “Affection without artifice,” the Vanir said, voice light distortion through the interference of Thor’s rising will. “You are beautiful, and you are powerful. I would have you for that gift alone, though if you wish payment for it – well, you shall have it.”_

_Loki laughed, the sound broken by the tesseract’s escalating murmur of change and redoing. “If only it were so easy.”_

_“So, then, let us begin.”_

_Thor cannot watch. But then he cannot look away. His hands are tight, the power is true, and he could change this. He could change everything so that this might never ha—_

_“Thor.” Loki’s whisper echoed about the chamber, soft and sudden. And the seiðmaðr laughed even as Thor goes unutterably still, his cock deep within his brother’s body._

_“Do not fool yourself – he will not want this as you do.” And he leaned forward, chest to back, dropping his words into his brother’s ear. “He could never love a creature as twisted as you, for all he might lower himself itself to put a bastard child in your poison womb.”_

_But Loki’s smile was peaceful, eyes slipping closed. “Liar.”_

_And Thor closes his own eyes, the power between his hands subsiding like his rage. He has seen enough. He has been blinded, by the light and by his own foolish heart._

_But no more._

_The power of the tesseract thrums within him still, the twisting turning power of potential; should he take it between his hands he knows he might spin it like a kaleidoscope. The colours will always be the same, the pieces unchanged: but they will fall differently, the light will cut through in different strokes, longer and shorter in turn, and the picture of the world will be different. Perhaps more pleasing, in his eyes._

But this is our turn.

_And he smiles, again, and lets it all go._

 

*****

 

His body rockets upward, hands pressed hard to furs while breath escapes him in all one great groan of sudden awakening. His vision dances with stars that explode with white light upon all edges of his vision, swimming in a filtered sea of pulsing black; at his side there comes a great crash of armour. He turns, feet upon the dirt floor, body tensed for combat: it is but his squire, whey-faced and frozen, staring at him as if he has seen a ghost.

Behind him sits a figure swathed in deep blue and silver, her amusement radiating from her like the coming of spring. “You are back, my lord king,” Snotra observes, and Thor cranes his neck about. All is familiar, he sees, as his vision clears. This is his tent. This is his place.

“What happened?”

“You caused the tesseract to retract in upon itself, and go quiescent.” She shifts in her place, though she appears not at all disturbed by the harsh tone of his demand. “In that, at least, you have saved reality.”

“I…” Kingly command gives way now to sudden confusion. “… _how_?”

“Peace. Acceptance.” Small hands tug the furs of her runed and blessed robes closer about shoulders that shrug with easy acceptance of wisdom and sudden knowing. “Call it, perhaps, the realisation that the change comes from within and not without.”

“I…didn’t do that.”

“Didn’t you?”

His head pounds with sudden headache; seiðr has never been his interest, save for the power of Mjölnir in his hand. But even as he grasps for her, he knows she is far hence; for all she’d been with him within the dream, she is parted from him now. As is—

“Where is Loki?”

“The battle has resumed.” Now Snotra rises, moving past where Þjálfi’s trembling hands gather up the armour he had dropped. Her eyes are for her warrior king alone. “Nerþuz is determined to overrun the Aesir force, though in the end she will fall.” For the first time emotion breaks through rapid cracks in her façade of wise distance, and she grimaces. “Though many will die for her belief, should it be permitted to continue.”

The responsibility of it prickles over his skin, each tiny needle a life his kingship permits him to keep or discard as the great weave requires. “And Loki?”

“Is at her side.” One white hand rises, fingertips dancing light over an amulet set about her throat. “Motionless, wordless. Watching. Waiting.”

_For me_. Abrupt, he turns for the exit. “I will go to him.”

That same hand comes to rest upon his arm, her strength no womanish fragile thing. He turns, meets the hard gaze of a goddess who can be as much a warrior as she is wise when the time calls for it. “The power is still with you.”

“What?”

Her eyes are very hard with her quiet warning. “The tesseract has muted itself,” she intones, unforgiving in this truth. “But not because it cannot be used.”

Again, that sensation he had felt at the last moment of the memory moves within him. It is the sense of potential, of the power to change _everything_. Driving deeper than the military march of the berserker, it is a lower song not of war, but of _worlds_ : those that are, those that were, those that will and will not ever be.

“I will not use it.” His voice is clipped, final. “The world is as it is. We will only remake it from what it already gives us.”

And she shakes her head, almost close to something like despair. “But then that is what the tesseract _does_ ,” she murmurs, though there is no fear in her when she pushes him forward. In fact there lurks something almost like amusement upon her rounded features. “So then, _go_ to him.”

As he looks upon her now Thor sees something in her of their mother, for all Snotra is rich curve and almost girlish, where Frigga is tall slender elegance. Still she inspires in him the spontaneous need to take her hand, brushing dry lips over her knuckles. Then he is summoning his squire even as he begins himself to adjust his armour. Þjálfi’s hands have regained surety after the shock of his master’s return and are quick about their work, but Thor’s thoughts are far afield. Mjölnir is not here, but he can feel her. She lies where he let her fall, and she waits.

Only when he strides out of the tent does he summon her to his hand. Then he is moving himself, launched into the air like a great mass of unforgiving stone thrown from a mighty trebuchet. With a powerful crouch he lands hard, but not in the centre of the fray beneath. He is high yet, and there is but one watchful person upon this lonely outcrop of rock and wind. He also seems not at all surprised to see him, notching another indolent arrow as his sharp eyes remain on the battle below.

“Wondered when you’d be back,” Barton remarks when Thor comes close by his side.

“How goes the battle?”

“On and on.” He looses his bowstring, and then gives a low grunt of appreciation as a brilliant explosion propels a cluster of Vanir to the ground like a tumble of skittles. “I guess that’s the problem with you immortals; we could do this all day, sure, but you guys could do this all _year_.”

“You might be giving our stamina somewhat too much credit, Friend Barton,” Thor returns, wry. “Where is my brother?”

But he has no real need to ask; if he looks Thor can see him even from this distance. Loki is at the centre though behind the immediate lines of fighting. The flickering orb of a shield is cast over the two figures within, both of them watchful with only the scarcest knots of battling bodies near them. He can see no sign of Sigrdrífa, but Thor cannot doubt she is far from her queen.

“Stark said Loki’s sort of gone off the deep end again, but then I pointed out he’s apt to do that,” Barton remarks suddenly, bow singing with another shot; Thor frowns as he realises he’d sought very little information from Snotra.

“How did I return to my tent?”

“Stark.” His fingers move again over his quiver, seeking an arrow long and shining black. “He says you weigh a ton, by the way. Like, a literal ton. And that JARVIS is never going to forgive him for the stress he put on the suit. Apparently he’s told Stark to go on a diet.”

Thor cannot help his smile, nor his frown. “Who is this JARVIS, exactly?”

“His conscience.” For the first time Barton looks up from his work, face still and watchful. “They’re still by the tesseract, you realise?”

His pulse leaps, though his voice remains even yet. “Snotra said it had closed in upon itself.”

“Yeah. We’re getting the impression they can’t move it, which is why they’re staying where they are.”

Barton’s eyes have returned to the field, and Thor follows them with narrowed gaze. “Whose side does he appear to be on?”

“Nerþuz isn’t threatening him in any way that I can see. But then it’s hard to tell.”

“I see.”

“And I see best from a distance.” Barton faces him now, and there is something knowing in his gaze when he quirks that small smile upwards. “I’ll have an eye on him all the time, don’t you worry about _that_. I owe him something, and he knows it.”

With those words comes the sense of something unspoken, and Thor thinks again how odd it is. Loki has always had few friends outside Thor’s own circle; Angrboða and Amora are the only he can name, and Thor had scarcely known the witch of Járnviðr, whereas the hungry gaze of the high-born seiðkona had long left him uncomfortable enough that he would avoid her where possible. Even without words she had always demanded more of him than he felt willing to give.

But for all their own camaraderie he thinks Barton to be Loki’s friend first and foremost, though it seems a very peculiar friendship between them. With a faint smile he shakes his head, tests Mjölnir’s weight in his hand. “My brother is fortunate to have you.”

“Yeah, tell him that when he’s handing out tribute for putting up with his shit, would you?” Barton replies, again about his work, and Thor must snort.

“There is not gold enough in all the realms for that.”

“So why do you do it?”

The genuine curiosity of it makes him blink. “I haven’t much care for gold.”

“Yeah, but then you’re king of a castle made of gold.”

Barton’s low irony cannot help but make him smile. “Only sometimes,” he qualifies, and then frowns. “But tell me…”

“Yeah?”

“Who is the troll? I’ve never seen another of its ilk. Especially not aligned to us.”

“The _troll_? I don’t…oh.” He actually laughs then, wry and almost wicked. “That’s Dr. Banner.”

Thor squints. “He…does not look well.”

“Understatement of the year.”

Again, Thor feels he is missing some greater story that he is but peripheral part of. There’s a strange regret in that, a nostalgia for a time that never was. “I did not think you were much given over to sorcery upon Midgard?”

“It’s the mortal magic we call science, I suppose,” he mutters, and curses lightly as he apparently does not find the arrowhead he wishes for. “He’s fine. Well, he’s not _fine_ , but for whatever reason he tends to listen when Stark shouts something at him.” Taking another, he adds: “I swear to God, I think the Hulk’s the only one who understands half the crap that comes of that guy’s mouth.”

Thor cannot argue this, though his attention has already moved to again take in the lay of the battle. From this vantage point he can see much; Barton has chosen well. Different units and battalions move about their constant engagements. The Midgardians are scattered amongst them; Sif is with Agent Romanov, the two of them a twice-bladed sword slicing like a scythe through ranks of Vanir warriors. The Man of Iron is overhead, a moving sniper and eye whereas Barton is static upon his chosen eyrie. The Captain appears to have all but become an integral part of a squad below, and the good doctor is a force unto himself.

Then, there are those others whom he has known and fought with his life entire: Fandral, Volstagg, and Hogun. His friends, his comrades, and then more – Týr, Ullr, Baldr, a thousand others who have campaigned with him since the first time he had slain an enemy in the name of the Allfather.

But it is waste, and it may be ended before it becomes even worse than it already is. Thor turns his attention to the glittering dome where Loki stands at the side of the Vanir queen. His heart tightens, then sets hard. This is where it had all begun, and this is too where it shall all come to its end.

Mjölnir bears him aloft again, and he hits the ground hard before them. Loki’s eyes widen, just imperceptibly – but Nerþuz’s face contorts in fury, for all neither of them strike. There is no need; for all it is not thick here, there is still battle around them. Thor must give over to it: to attack and parry, his arm gifted to the swing of the hammer like it is but extension of his true self.

From their place Thor catches glimpses of her scowling visage, though there is triumph there too. Loki is different. Loki is unreadable and still. And Thor remembers the agony he had been in when last he had seen him, doubled over his belly. Pale as he remains, the pain appears gone – and though the power of the tesseract has gone with it, Thor can feel a twinge of it still within him. _Other futures_ , he thinks, but there is scarcely time for that. He must surrender himself to his battles and his body while his brother’s eyes remain ever watchful upon him. It cannot help but remind him of the shadowed features Loki had worn while speaking to the Vanir seiðmaðr in that damned chamber.

Though Thor never once doubts his ability to fight and to win, he begins to despair of ever having chance even to challenge either of those who watch him from within. And then, they are there, descended like Valkyries from he knows not where: Sif and Romanov, sword and shield each to each. Between the three of them a path clears, and Sif turns to him as she flicks both hair and sweat from her battle-maddened gaze.

“Sort your brother out, Thor,” she snaps, and then turns her attention back to another burgeoning fight. “We haven’t got all day.”

But Thor’s gaze is arrested by the self-made queen who stands at Loki’s side, her long hair in braided crown about her pale features, her body draped in palest blue as she at last grants him audience.

“So you are returned.” Her rich lips rend her smile in twain, hands tight over the swell of her belly. “Your brother’s plan failed, it seemed.”

“My brother is stubborn,” Loki replies, mild as always; she turns on him then, hands vicious where they fist in the heavy colour of his light armour.

“Then do what you swore.” Loki only blinks, and she shakes him harder than Thor would have thought possible given her small frame. “This is what you wanted!” she shouts. “I gave it to you! I let you sacrifice the greatest seiðmaðr of this realm for this child of yours! Now give me what _I_ want and let me and mine have what is ours!”

Loki’s eyes are impassive upon her, promising nothing even as she shakes him again. Then he looks back to Thor. Mockery burns bright within his eyes, set at the centre of an expression Thor has seen all too many times just before Loki has pulled some great trick upon them all.

“So mote it be.”

He pulls free from Nerþuz’s demanding grasp, hands rising above his head. A darkening of the sky is as familiar as any storm Thor might call, but the rumble of distant thunder is not his doing. Upon his tongue is the taste of salt, and of iron. Both are clean and cold. And then:

“Oh, _gods_.”

Vanaheimr has always been a land given over to water, with its great lakes and rivers and endless days of mist and rain; it is an element as changing as it is immutable. It is still and it is moving, it is liquid and it is solid and it is vapour. It is all things and none, much as the futures of mortal and immortal alike. And thus Thor knows it is only but natural than Loki ought to have used the tesseract to summon him here, to give him free reign through storm-choked sky: Jörmungandr, scales glittering green against grey as he twists and turns and _roars_.

The Man of Iron apparently thinks twice about remaining skyborne with such a hulking creature. When he hits the ground hard, his voice carries like a clarion bell across the field. “What the _hell_ is that?”

Sif is still, her eyes shielded from what weak sun there is as she looks upon one of his brother’s most famous monstrosities. “The great sea-serpent Jörmungandr.”

“It’s in the sky. The sky is not the sea. What’s a sea-serpent doing in the _sky_?”

“Are you applying logic to magic and monsters again, Stark?” Romanov asks mildly, and even behind his mask Thor can imagine his grimace.

“Yeah. You’re right. I should be applying whiskey to this. All the damn whiskey on the planet.” He pauses, and when he speaks again it’s something between plaintive and panicked. “They _have_ whiskey here, right?”

“You can’t drink and drive.”

“The last I heard you thought I couldn’t drive at all.”

She blinks, and then shrugs. “Yes, and the point still stands.”

But Thor does not have time for the games of the mortals; it is the games of his brother that he must turn his hand to now. He takes a step forward, the fine hairs of arm and neck prickling with rising energy the closer he dares come to the pulsing light of his brother’s seiðr-wrought barrier. “Loki.”

“Thor.” He gives a little nod, peculiar and true. “Come, brother, you’ve been away from me. Surely you know things are better seen from a distance?”

At first the echoed words make not the slightest sense. Then Loki raises an eyebrow, exasperated, and Thor grins so wide it _hurts_. Mjölnir almost seems to rear back of her own accord, and then he smashes her hard against the barrier. It matters not that it does not break, that it only shimmers beneath the great force of her star-death head; the moment Mjölnir hits an arrow flashes through, just at the precise centre of its weakening.

And then Barton’s arrow trembles in Loki’s grip, his laughter cutting through the sudden widening of Nerþuz’s eyes. “Will you ever learn that I shall not fall for that?” he says with mocking ease, and she lets out a startled laugh of her own.

“Such foolish children your brother holds about him.”

“Indeed,” he says, with tender affection. “Some might even call it his strength, fool that he is too,” he whispers. “But then we are all fools for those we love, are we not?”

Her mouth opens, but Loki has given her no more time to speak; the arrow flashes around, down, drives deep into the breast and to the vulnerable beat of her heart beneath.

“Oh for fuck’s sake, whose side is this guy _on_?”

“He is Loki.” And Thor is moving to him, swift, the shield dissipated and fallen. Jörmungandr’s scream seems to shake the ground below, his spiralling body coiled across the sky high above. Though the battles have scarcely been interrupted since his first arrival now they begin to falter, to cease, all looking around to see what has befallen the worlds now.

Then another shriek entire rends the air in twain. Sigrdrífa moves like death itself, blood-soaked and honour-bound as she ploughs through the mud, morning star a fierce whirl before and behind. It is Romanov who grabs her, her slim body a shadow darting in low from her unguarded side, but Sif moves in hard and fast to aid her in holding down a true immortal. “What have you _done_?” she screams, and though she struggles the true force of her ire is turned upon Loki alone. “You traitorous bastard _dog_!”

And he meets it with easy disdain, hands folded before the flat plane of his own abdomen. “I am born of one realm and adopted by another; you cannot blame me for being fluid in my allegiances.”

“Jötunn _whore_ ,” she spits, and for a moment it seems she might break free; Sif’s grip has slipped, but Romanov’s holds tight and within a moment her grip goes deeper than even before. Loki remains unreadable, as has long been his habit amongst the high courts and halls of Asgard and all the eight realms beyond her golden spires.

“Hold your peace,” he murmurs, and her first answer is an incoherent hiss of sibilant syllable. And then she tosses her head, fury deepening to intemperate rage.

“I will rend you limb from limb for this,” she swears with dark eyes like open void, “and the realms shall not mourn you, creature of lies and betrayal that you are.”

“I am the creeping chaos.” But Loki is still here, immutable as the Norns about their work. “I have my place, and I shall take it.”

“And her place?” Her maddened laughter rises to the heavens, to the uneasy serpent that dogs them even now. “And what, too, of her child’s place? You did not even allow her to live to see the world that was to be hers!”

That is a great swelling regret in him too, tumorous upon Thor’s own conscience; he must force himself to look to the body with its arrow, to see true the great swell of the child in her still form.

“Alas, sacrifices must be made,” his brother murmurs, relentless as the turn of Yggdrasil herself. Thor feels quite ill until the moment Loki laughs, bright and sudden. “Though her child shall live.”

Sigrdrífa’s struggle stills, her shock absolute. “What?”

“It is a gift given to my archer, and a gift of his skill alike.” One hand moves, half-careless, over the line of Nerþuz’s fallen body; for the first time, Thor notes how little blood has spilled from the ugly wound over her left breast. “The arrow was wrought of seiðr-grown mistletoe, its tip coated in the distilled nectar of the Lady Iðunn’s finest harvest.”

“She is not dead?” Sigrdrífa whispers, and her gladness is terrible to see. Loki shakes his head, as unforgiving in his truths as he always has been in his lies.

“Your lady shall not die until it is removed, though the endless sleep has already overtaken her. But her child is wakeful yet.” His hand ghost over his own belly, for all it holds still the illusion of flatness. Sigrdrífa’s eyes flare hot, her hopeful misery crumbled now into sneering mask of hate. But Thor can still see the desolation in her, underwritten always by the fierce pride of a woman who will not let go of a promise long made.

“She is not yours.”

Loki nods. “And the child shall not be held responsible for the sins of the parent who bore her.” His own hand spasms where palm still presses to leather and mail. “She is the rightful heir to the throne of Vanaheimr. And I of all people shall not deny her the right to be where she was always destined to go.”

“And yet you will take her,” she says, gone very still. There remains that absolute despair there, but her eyes are bright yet. “You will take her from this place and give her over to those who never were to be her parents.”

“She will be given to the Allmother until there is found those worthy to raise her here.”

And she shudders, head bowed for all she yields nothing. “Give her to me.”

Loki seems not surprised, though he raises one eyebrow. “You are no mother.”

And when Sigrdrífa looks up then, her loosed hair has become a wild red tangle about her face. “I am all she has in this world.” The defiance drives deep, like the points of her fallen weapon. “I am the only one left who will love her for who she is, not what.”

“You are in no position to bargain with me.”

As if to echo his father-mother’s words, the snake overhead gives that haunted cry again, impossible though it ought to be from so serpentine a throat. It sends uneasy tightness through Thor’s already tensed muscles, and his eyes drop downwards in quick sweep. The field is collapsing around everyone upon it. Thor knows he must go to them, must corral them, must bring some order to this endless bedlam. But at its centre stands Loki, with Sigrdrífa and her fallen mistress. If that centre does not hold first, then all about it will fall either now, or in time.

“Let me stay with her,” the warrior says now, and Loki shakes his head one more time, the still core of all pandemonium.

“You must know that is impossible.”

“So what will you do with me?” She pulls again at the grip of Romanov and Sif, gains little. “You will kill me where I stand?”

“If that is the death you wish.”

“I have another in mind.” Both Romanov and Sif fall back with sudden cries, the warrior all but alight with blue fire beneath their startled hands. And she turns, restored morning star flashing out like arching death, and then she is upon _Loki_. Her scream of rage is that given over to a killing blow, but such intention matters not. Loki’s shield glances it away and then he is but a flash of motion as he spins a dagger towards her throat. She parries, strong and swift; as battle rears to fierce life Thor can see the pair of them are strangely well-matched. But in this he cares not for rules of engagement. His own roar of anger trembles across the sky, Mjölnir rearing back, but it matters not. Loki’s hands are about her wrists and he has drawn her close.

Too close, perhaps.

“Nerþuz never did like you,” she whispers, and explodes in shattering silver-streaked light. Both fall back, hard and heavy and terribly silent. Sigrdrífa lies still, her body half-charred and broken – and there’s relief in that, her death quick and sudden. But then, too, there is the scent of saltwater. And it coils in his gut, the sudden realisation that the magical ending to this duel had held nothing of the familiar glow of Loki’s green-rich seiðr, which has always tasted to him of frost and freshwater. This is not his magic. And though Sigrdrífa is unmoving, Loki has fallen with her and does not rise.

 “ _Loki_!”

The scream of Jörmungandr is amplified by, not lost in the storm crash overhead. Thor cares not for either, on his knees at his brother’s side. But as he searches, he finds Loki’s breath comes strong beneath his hand, his pulse steady yet. But there is nothing in him of wakefulness, and with Jörmungandr loosed and no master to call his coiled chaos to heel—

“This is…bad, right?”

Thor grimaces, Loki’s blood strange and cool beneath his fingers. But much of it comes from his scalp, and for all Thor knows to expect blood and unconsciousness from such his fear is a frightful thing. “Loki.” His fingers dig deep into skin despite the leather above it. “Loki, get up. Damn you, get _up_.”

“Is he dead?” Stark asks, startled; Thor snorts, almost wants to laugh at the belief that the Liesmith of Asgard would permit himself to die in so ignominious a fashion.

“No. It seems he knew enough of what she ended to shield himself from the worst of it. But still he…”

Sif has come to her knees in the mud, a pouch torn from her belt. The warmth of stones in his hand comes a moment later, but Thor shakes his head and presses them back. “I do not think it will work.”

“Why is that?”

“It is not physical.”

Her face contorts as she looks to the fallen warrior with undisguised loathing. “She was seiðkona, too?”

“No,” he says, for all he cannot resent the warrior’s decision to give her life for the honour of the one she held most dear. “But Nerþuz was, and it seems she gave her beloved champion many gifts indeed.” Thor sits back upon his heels, hands tight over his thighs. “And I doubt even she would have been fool enough to trust Loki.”

“Who is?” Stark mutters, and Thor gives him a blistering look.

“I am.”

Stark’s already opening his mouth to deliver something Thor can only think ill-advised when another voice breaks in, hard and uncompromising. “So what are we going to do about _that_ , then?”

It is the Captain, always the voice of reason in a sea of madness. Thor had not even realised he had approached. As he levers to his feet again, leaving Loki draped beneath the cape he has torn off to cover him with, Thor notices that on both sides the fleeing from the field has begun. Jörmungandr casts a long shadow, and a dark one. Stark is looking up again, his visor open and face screwed up in sceptical annoyance.

“Is that even fair? That he can fly, I mean?” He scowls deeper. “I don’t remember him flying in the myths.”

“You’re not in a fairytale now, Mr. Stark.”

“Thanks for that, Sleeping Beauty.” There’s a disapproving look upon the Captain’s face, in fact something very nearly paternal, but Stark has already turned his attention to Thor. “So what next, Prince Charming?”

His warrior nature is in deep conflict with his heart; there is both joy and regret when he flicks his eyes upward, and down. “We must deal to my brother’s child. Without Loki to command him, there is no telling what the disorder of this world will do to him.”

“Your…all right. _Right_.” Stark tries to run a hand back through his hair, fails when he discovers he’s still wearing his helm. “You know, I’d actually forgotten about that little wrinkle? Thanks for the brain-bleach memory.”

“How can you even bring it down?” Sif says; her eyes have scarcely left the creature’s uneasy roiling form above their head, and Thor does not doubt her quick mind has already come up with half a dozen strategies. “It is a creature of seiðr. We should summon—”

“No. I shall do it.” The calm before the storm has settled over him like a mantle, far lighter and easier to bear than any of kingship. “I want you to take the others and return to the front, spread the word of Nerþuz’s death and allow it to be known that arms should be laid down so that peace might be wrought before this day has ended.”

Stark’s incredulous look should have set something aflame. “There’s _a giant sea snake_ in the sky.”

“I shall deal to that.”

“Yeah, but as I remember it, in the myths—”

“Stark.” The Captain’s interruption is that of a warrior born and known, and though he directs his words to the Iron Man Thor can feel the respect of one who knows how to let others take the risks and make the sacrifices as their honour and nature dictate. “Stark, just let the man do what he needs to.”

“He’s not a man, he’s a _god_.”

“Exactly.”

This time he rolls his eyes to the sky and appears to speak to no-one in particular. “It’s not even that I don’t get paid enough for this shit. It’s more that I don’t actually get paid at _all_.”

The debate from that point on matters little to him. The doctor’s distant roars speak of battles still ongoing, and Thor can see Sif’s attention lingers both upon Loki, and then the bodies of the queen and her champion. Something strange flickers in her eyes, and he remembers that she had heard Sigrdrífa’s words.

_Jötunn whore_.

“We should take them back to camp,” she says, finally, and when their eyes meet there is nothing there but loyal duty and trust. “They will not be safe here.”

The logistics of it roll off his mind like water from a duck’s back, his attention alone arrested by Jörmungandr above. The serpent’s every movement is uneasy, restless, an undirected force waiting to be summoned to his purpose.

_And if he is given it not, then what is left to him but to destroy everything?_

“What are you going to do?”

Romanov’s voice is low, as knowing as the conviction in her eyes. “What I must.” For the first time since returning from its dream, Thor looks to the tesseract, wedged deep within the soil of Vanaheimr. It is silent, holding little more than a faint pulsing blue glow. But it sings even in said silence, beating with the measure of his heart. And he looks up one final time. Above him moves a creature made entirely of Loki’s will and seiðr, released upon the world so that all things might change; so that all things might stay the same.

“I am sorry, brother.”

With no further thought he gives himself over to the air, that formless element which bears both storm and the god at its centre alike. Jörmungandr, his mounting rage as yet undirected, curves about to face his challenger. The great eyes, black and fathomless, fix upon Thor with a simple intelligence that turns his stomach even as he hardens his heart – and his grip upon ever-sparking Mjölnir.

“I am not your enemy,” Thor shouts. But it is no matter. Loki had summoned him here only as a false weapon, but ever conscientious as his sly mind is, Loki had sharpened him all the same. And with Sigrdrífa’s last stand leaving Loki lost to command, there is now none who can control him.

_But I will aid you, nephew_ , he thinks, fingers tight about leathered shaft. _I will let you rest, so all this might be done and gone._

With his attention drawn, Jörmungandr strikes. He flows through the sky as if it is water, as easy in his sinuous movements as a wingless dragon. As Thor ducks away, the strength of Mjölnir veering him aside, he recalls a battle long ago waged with Fafnir. That mighty creature had very nearly brought him low, and he had not even been trying to pull his punches that day. It is so much easier to battle when one cares not for the opponent’s state at the end of it.

But there is something of that, too, in Jörmungandr; for all his jaws snap, the wicked swing of his great head leaving a sizzling trail of venom upon armour, Thor cannot help but believe that the serpent is not truly trying to harm him. It seems as though he fights the nature of his existence, and when Thor catches him about his neck it is as if, for but that moment, he sees a flash of familiar green deep in those black eyes.

“I am sorry, friend,” he whispers. And for all that he is, this is the moment when he first allows the power of the tesseract move through him. It had been forbidden, that first time; what Loki had done then Thor will not change now. But this is different, and he feels the truth of it as the sky answers a call he has not made. Thunder chases lightning across the sky, a great booming laugh as silver strikes all in cool illumination, and Thor closes his eyes. His body is alight, his body is alive, and he is more than the so-named God of Thunder in this. The tesseract responds to him, changing things that have not yet been set in stone this turn before the twilight, making it anew from what already was and what now never will be.

And when he lets go, Jörmungandr falls. But he does not hit the ground. Rather, he _becomes_ the ground, his great body sinking beneath the soil to the water beneath. Coiled about the world of Vanaheimr he goes still, falls silent. High above Thor wavers, bright centre of the storm raging about him even yet. But that is not the power he had called, for all it had come so easy to him. It is still the power of the tesseract thrumming through him, whispering again and again of what he might do should he just turn his mind to it.

_No_ , he whispers, and gives himself back to the storm he knows true. _No, I…_

It is too much, and he has no care, no need for it now.

He lets go.

There is no memory in him of falling. He does not even remember hitting the ground, not exactly – though it seems Mjölnir has more sense than her master, or perhaps it is the storm that curves about him to slow his descent – for while he lands hard, high above the field behind the lines of the camp, it startles the Midgardian heroes more than it does him.

“Jesus _Christ_.”

“Nah,” the Man of Iron corrects Barton, voice crackled and distorted both through the mask and the electrical interference of divine storm, “nah, I think you mean _Thor Almighty_.”

“Thor?” Sif’s hands are hard upon him, forcing him upward, tracing over the head that had only just avoided smacking the harsh rock of the outcrop. “Thor, are you all right?”

“Where is my brother?”

It is the Captain who answers, handsome face set in harsh contemplation. “You kind of just passed each other. He’s down – no, _wait_ , he’s coming ba—”

The words are gone, and so is Thor. He can feel Loki. He can even _see_ him, on his knees down on the battlefield where his son had fallen. Pale hands press to the soil where Jörmungandr now lies sleeping, a weapon poised and promised and pitiless. The guilt hangs as heavy upon him as does Loki’s bowed head. Shame comes with it, too, burning upon the wick of the helpless wish that it had not needed to be this way.

_And so here lies Jörmungandr: just another weapon, locked up until Asgard has use of him._

But then even Thor himself is the same – though he is blunted, broken now, this weapon of war used beyond limit and decency. Exhaustion beats at him from all sides, but the rains over the stormplain are a welcome pressure. It keeps him upon his weary feet when he takes every step as an automaton, like the Destroyer summoned to but one purpose from his father’s vault. Yet each footfall must be forced, and he is wavering. _Yes_ , his mind says, but his body screams _No!_ and he cannot go on. He is sinking to his knees in mud and mire, Mjölnir falling to one side.

_Loki_.

And as if summoned the voice comes out of the mists, sudden and shocked. “Thor!” And then, again: “ _Thor_!”

Before he can fall he is there: Loki, eyes filled with rain and tears and hands about his shoulders as he goes too to his knees, body pressed tight against his like a weight-bearing pillar. “You idiot,” he says, and now he holds his face between his hands, forcing him to look nowhere else but him. “You fool, you gave too much. You didn’t need to give that much.”

Thor’s crooked smile is strangely easy upon his face for all everything else is one indistinguishable ache. “I am fine. Have you ever known me not to be, brother?”

At first Loki says nothing. He can only stare, it seems, hair bedraggled in the rain and curling with the damp. The face has gone bone pale, eyes wide and disbelieving. Then, impossibly, he laughs.

“You were not supposed to do that.”

“Do I always do as you expect me to?”

“Usually.” And then his expression crumples like paper, the rough chaos of anger and frustration and misery. “Oh, _Thor_ , you damned stupid oaf.”

Though his arms remain strong about him, Loki buries his face deep into the warm curve of his brother’s neck; despite the ache of shoulder, the numbness of his fingers, Thor curves his palm about the back of his skull, tangling the ruin of his hair even further. “Me?” he says, and he cannot help a laugh of his own. “I should beat you into the dust for what you’ve done to my heart.”

The choked voice is a murmured mess against his pulse. “It was necessary.”

“It wasn’t.” And his hand tightens even as his fingertips move in soothing circles. “I would have told you I love you and always will, if you’d just _asked_.”

Loki leans back now, but Thor allows it; something in his eyes tells him it is but physical, even as his brother gives him a despairing glare. “If only the world could be as simple as you.”

“It can be.”

He just shakes his head, drawing gingerly away. “Come, brother,” he says, wincing as he levers himself to his feet. “Let us go home.”

Though it is a wonder to him that Loki can even stand, his brother is the bolster that keeps Thor upright as they both begin to stagger forward and back. They do not go far in distance, though it seems far further in time before they hear Sif running forward, shouting and scolding alike. Although it is Volstagg who lurches forward to lace an arm about his waist so his broad body might take the weight Loki surrenders, it is Stark’s voice he remembers later, and the wonder upon his face as he casts about the battlefield for a final time.

“Shit,” he says, and whistles low and long. “Does anyone else feel like we just had front row tickets to _Ragnarök: The Rehearsal_?”

 

*****

 

It is Týr and Baldr who remain to watch over the realm of Vanaheimr when the triumphant warriors finally take their leave. The logistics of the withdrawal are long and tedious, but for the moment Thor will not remain. Though a night cloistered in his tent in a healing trance has him awakening to feel somewhat himself, there is no time for anything but the relentless drudgery of diplomacy and logistics. Loki is ever at his right hand, but there is so much to be said between them.

_Sleep, now,_ he had said that previous night, hand upon his brow when finally he had surrendered to exhaustion both of body and spirit. _It will wait, brother_. _Let us first return home_.

It is enough for him that Loki would name it so. And so they return, the king and his brother – but the queen sits upon the golden throne, awaiting them. Without hesitation Thor goes and kneels before her, this glittering image of queendom and motherhood both.

“I am but your humble servant,” he says, Mjölnir’s head upon the golden runes of the lower dais and his cape like a spilled river of blood behind him. “I bring you tidings of both sorrow and joy, but there shall be peace and prosperity in time for all those who have lived through such turmoil.”

“Then rise again before your people, Thor son of Odin,” she says, her face careful regal mask, “and be it known across all the realms the great service you have done both throne and Asgard.” And then she smiles, as bright as the sun breaking the horizon. When she descends it is still with Gungnir in one hand, arms opened wide. “Welcome home, my king,” she whispers into his hair, and then Loki is there and her laughter takes on the sharp tang of saltwater. “ _My sons_.”

He should not be able to hear her heartbeat over the roar of their peoples, but somehow he can.

There is a great feast – always, there is a great feast. His body is still a ragged shadow of its greater self, but he dresses in his finest ceremonial armour and grins wide and easy as he sits first at his place, and then roams the great hall, weaving between tables and knotted groups of warriors and nobles alike. Loki spends a great deal of his time at the high table, slim and dark in black and gold worn with but the barest hint of green. It leaves a hollow ache in his chest, that Loki should still hide himself in such plain sight.

_But then, that has always been his greatest trick_.

 The Midgardians remain yet although they are to return at the feast’s conclusion; from Stark’s behaviour, however, Thor will readily agree with Barton’s wry observation that they may have some trouble wrangling the Man of Iron back upon the Bifröst. But certainly to a man – and woman – they are touted amongst the highest of Asgardian warriors.

When the feast is ended in the earliest hours of the morning, the Midgardians have a great retinue to bear them home. Torches and singing and wine flowing free accompany them through golden streets. It has been said more than once that they should remain longer yet, but the Captain is insistent that there are reports to be made.

“Which _you_ are writing,” Stark says, more sober now than he has appeared all evening. “Although with that said, it’s _Barton_ who’s got the sweet touch with Coulson. Even if he is your biggest fan.”

“Do give Friend Coulson our regards,” Thor says, forestalling any further argument; Stark rolls his eyes as if the Asgardian has drained all amusement from the situation.

“Sure thing, flip-flop.” Then he frowns again. “And I guess we shouldn’t be asking for the tesseract back?”

Thor shudders at the memory of it. No other could lift it, not even Loki; he’d given him a strange sour little smile when Thor had plucked it from the damp soil following the failure of half a dozen seiðkona. _Between this and Mjölnir, you will garner yourself quite the reputation for hefting things no other can coax to rise_ , he’d said. And yet there had been pride there, liberally laced with a familiar kind of mischief, and it had fluttered low down in his gut even as Loki had turned away to go about his own work.

“We don’t want it.” The Captain says this, sharp and unforgiving even as Stark opens his mouth in reflexive protest. “Your father never should have fished it out of the ocean after I went down.”

“But then we wouldn’t have _your_ sparkling wit and company,” he counters. But then his smile turns peculiar, thoughtful in a way that almost seems alien to his nature as Thor has known it. “Actually, I think it’s for the best.” One hand moves over his arc reactor, scarcely disguising its bright gleam. “It might be a bit too much for us. As is.”

“Perhaps.” Thor grasps that same wrist in a warrior’s shake, eyes warm for all the warning that lurks far behind it. “But you have done us great service, and it shall not be easily forgotten.”

Barton and Loki are embroiled in their own peculiar goodbye, heads close together while the flame-haired warrior woman watches with an expression that can only be named _long-suffering_. For his own part Thor cannot quite see what passes between them, besides a gift of a quiver of arrows that could be nothing but enchanted, but then it does not seem to matter. Heimdall summons the power to his sword, drives it deep into enchanted stone: and they are all gone, and they are alone.

“You would have words with me then, brother?”

“That will come,” and that is their mother’s voice. For all the easy melody of it, for all she has given over the throne again to her returned son, there is still command there that they have known from the cradle. “There is someone who wishes a word with you both.”

Until this moment there has been nothing from their father, save their mother’s quiet assurance that he waits to speak with them both when the ceremonies are complete and they may withdraw with dignity from the celebrations. Even now Thor cannot ask why Odin has not resumed his throne yet. He only nods, Loki close at his side. “Let us go back to the palace, then.”

They walk behind their mother, though she is no longer regent in her son’s return. But Thor is of no hurry nor mind to take such responsibility from her yet. Loki remains tall at his side, silent even when they are left alone in their father’s solar, thoughtful as they wait upon his grace.

But Thor has never been one for such; he is already debating how best to break this light ice between them when Loki sighs, sudden. “You are angry with me.”

“Yes. No.” Thor rubs at his head as if that might order the thoughts he has barely had time to give his mind over to; in truth they have not had a decent moment alone to speak of what had passed between them. “It sounds ridiculous, maybe, but…but then you know, don’t you?” Loki turns to face his penetrating gaze, expressionless. “I wished to unleash the tesseract and so gave myself over to it, but you knew what I would see before I got so far.”

Now something wars with itself, both upon his face and deep within. Then Loki averts his eyes, as if his shame has become too heavy a weight to bear. “It was what I wanted, yes.”

“So how can I be angry with you when I know why you did it?”

He aches to touch him, to force Loki to again look him in the eye. But he does not, he cannot. “I should scold you for being so trusting,” Loki says finally and he is weary when he raises his eyes, “but then it is what saved us three.”

Thor’s gaze moves downward to the faint swollen place where the child rests in his view once more. There’s another prickle across his skin as he remembers, too, the other child who lies yet cradled in the body of her dying mother amongst the ladies of the Allmother. She will be the babe of brother and sister, the last queen of the Vanir.

_(“…and I of all people shall not deny her the right to be where she was always destined to go.”)_

“Some part of me thinks even to pity her,” Loki murmurs, and Thor’s attention snaps upward. There are words he could speak, he thinks, but all escape him; Loki’s returned gaze is almost pitying of him, too. But then, he is used to it. He has known Thor to be thus all their lives together.

“She loved him as I loved you, her great and brilliant elder brother.” The elaboration is gentle, almost tender in its tragedy. “Though she saw him only from afar.”

Loki drifts forward then, leaf upon a current that will not be denied. When they stand before one another, separated only by the tiniest sliver of time, it is Thor who raises his hand, fingers gentle where they cup about the exposed length of Loki’s neck. “At least close by you could always see my flaws,” he murmurs, dipping so that their eyes meet as their foreheads brush. “And how willing you have been always, in pointing them out to me.”

The forced levity falls flat under those careful eyes. “Standing as close as I do, it is a wonder I never burn.”

“I wouldn’t allow it.”

Loki’s smile is as bleak and it is bold. “But then I do burn,” he whispers. “It is simply that I am never consumed.”

Again, Thor has nothing but his silence to give. Loki accepts it, as he has so much his brother has clumsily offered over the years, and smiles himself.

“I cannot blame her, for believing as she did.” His head is a dark curve as he looks to his hands, to where the pale fingers tangle about one another like a tapestry worn to basest thread. “That if she had but that one thing she wanted so much, that all the worlds would remake themselves around her until everything was perfect.”

Thor’s heart is a hard lump in the back of his throat, scarcely allowing him space enough to whisper about its weight. “Well, I believed the same thing. Otherwise I never would have done what I did.”

Loki hums, soft. “Perhaps.” One hand moves over his abdomen, and he grimaces. “I only wish…”

“You have risked much by your actions, Loki.”

They both turn as almost one being to meet the force that is their named father. All vulnerability has vanished from Loki’s face now, his expression near glacial as he makes his first reply.

“I had much to risk for.”

The Allfather is garbed all in gold and bronze, no helm upon his head as he strides forward. Thor must fight the instinct to kneel, to bow his head before the power that blazes from spirit and body alike. But Odin has but one searching eye for Loki as he stands before the seiðmaðr he calls his son.

“And still you will risk more?” he asks, almost conversational. Loki in turn is as flat as the great sheets of ice across the great waste-oceans of frozen Jötunheimr.

“I will.”

The silence between father and youngest son is harsh, rife with rift. But a moment later Odin looks to Thor, his lined face the unforgiving visage of weathered granite. “And what say you, my son?”

It is the words of one king to another – for he speaks of his kingdom as much his own selves, that he knows for certain. “That I too would risk all for the child of my body, my blood, my heart and soul.”

A sigh escapes him then, heavy with a fate he had not wished. “Very well,” he murmurs. “It seems I am left with little choice.”

Adrenaline surges, fingers flickering over the haft of rousing Mjölnir; Odin’s answer is whipcrack sudden.

“Hold your peace, of lord of storm and war!” And then, for all his time in the Odinsleep, and the long days he has spent watchful and waiting, the Allfather now appears deeply weary as he raises one hand, shakes his silvered head as his voice sinks low once more. “I go to the Well.”

“The Well?”

Thor almost _feels_ the roll of Loki’s eyes, though he does not look away from the penetrating gaze of their father’s one eye. “Of Urðr,” he says, final and simple. “Only there will I find the wisdom to know what path is now ours to take.”

He holds his chin high, lets his conviction thunder through his words and his level gaze. “This is our path.”

“Which you would have an entire realm walk in your wake.” For the first time true temper flares, ancient body roused to sudden fury. “Did you never think of that, child that you are?”

“Father—”

“No.” And just as suddenly as it had come, it goes; the Allfather turns from his firstborn heir, shaking his head. “No, I will go, and you will remain king in my place.” But there is flinty warning there when he looks back, and Thor fancies he can feel the vestigial glare of even the missing eye when his father looks upon him now. “I bid you remember what lessons I have taught you.”

Thor has no answer for that, and Loki holds his peace. It matters not either way, for having said as much the Allfather is gone and it is but them alone.

Loki is already turning away, his voice low murmur through the chamber as he makes for the door their father had not left through. “You must sleep, brother,” he is saying, and the words knot tight in Thor’s throat.

“Stay with me.”

There is something kind to him even as he shakes his head. “No.” One palm rests upon the golden door, fingers splayed wide. “Come to me when you are rested, and we may talk all we please.” His face twists then, shame and sorrow alike. “But now, you must regain what strength I have taken from you.”

“I gave it.”

Loki nods, and like quicksilver he is across the golden floor. “You did,” he whispers, and now the palm of his hand is gentle and cool over his cheek, his smile a low curve. “Foolish boy that you are. The Allfather has always been correct in that, at least.”

Then he is gone too, and Thor is alone. But for all his heart sings that he should go, he that should chase and bring down the only prey worth the wildest of his hunts, his body has betrayed him, and he must sleep.

 

*****

 

Thor drowses for scarcely more than an hour before he wakes again. Morning has not come while his body aches still, yet his mind will not let him rest a moment longer. When he goes to her, seeking a succour known more to spirit than actual mind, Mjölnir is instead a muted weight that feels heavy in his hand. He leaves her where she rests upon her carved pedestal, pride of place in his rooms, and knows he must go elsewhere to find the peace he yearns for.

It is not hard for him to locate Loki. Something in him constantly murmurs of his brother’s presence, like a pulsing light that he cannot help but follow. He knows too that his brother will not be pleased to see him before dawnbreak, but Thor is the elder and he will abuse that privilege where he can. He always has. To his mind it seems Loki himself should be sleeping besides. He may not have overspent himself in the same fashion, but he was as much a part of the battle as Thor – and he cradles a babe within the fierce shield of his body. Loki should be abed as much as his fool of an older brother.

Yet finding him proves strange surprise. It is odd enough that his instinct should lead him to the great chamber of their father’s all-consuming rest, but when he opens the great doors Thor finds his brother seated by the empty bed. His gaze is thoughtful upon the furs and the golden ship that curves about them, and when he looks up there is no surprise in his eyes.

There are also no words as Thor moves to take his place opposite his brother, the absence of their father and his mission unspoken between them. Then he shakes his head, gives in first.

“Surely we should have gone with him.”

But his words carry no conviction even before Loki denies them. “The price of the Well is great,” he says, soft but infallible. “Drinking of its waters is no small thing, Thor.”

Annoyance prickles along his spine; Loki has always been the more knowing of them, from childhood classrooms unto battlefields and ballrooms. “I _know_ that. I’m not so much an idiot as you seem to think.”

“And I know that.” There is no force behind his words, only worn query as he leans back, shrouding himself in shadow once more. It makes Thor wish to reach between them, to pull him back into the dim golden light and hold him there always.

“What are you doing in here anyway?” Thor asks, sudden, and Loki blinks.

“Nothing in particular.” And then his voice takes the harder note Thor has been waiting for since the moment they began to speak. “Although I should ask what _you_ are doing here. I told you to sleep.”

“I couldn’t.”

“And why not?”

“I…I was just thinking.”

“A peculiar pastime for you, to be sure.”

Loki seems only to be half-spoiling for an argument, his words holding no real malice. With wry smile Thor looks back to the bed where their father had rested for so long while his sons sought truth in the world they fashioned. When he speaks, it is low and thoughtful. “He’s awakened again, and yet in this I am still king.”

“What, have you tired of the throne so soon?” But there is no mockery in him now, and Loki’s voice floats gentle across the distance between them when he says: “For the moment there is nothing more to be done. Take your rest where you will.”

Thor looks up. “And what will you be doing?”

“Plotting. Scheming. Whatever else it is that I do when I’m not actively causing mischief.” He rises, one hand moving in scornful slide over the golden edge of the bed before he turns to move back to his favoured shadows. “Surely you must have realised this, we’ve only known each other our entire lives.”

_Not our entire lives_. And yet for all this traitorous whisper of his darkest mind, Thor believes it does not matter, not truly. Watching Loki, half-shadowed in the dim light of the chamber, he finds him not so slender a silhouette now: his abdomen bears noticeable curve. Not that it has been shown to Asgard as a whole, not yet. They are still hiding, moving in shadow. And he knows for the first time the frustration of it, of how his brother has felt all these years.

And his brother is weighted down by this now in a way he has not been before – or perhaps it is more that Thor has never before been permitted to know it so. He is clearly wearied, pale face lined with thoughts that he usually masks so well. And he is silent, too, hands wrapped about one another as he comes to a pause. With his head bowed, beloved face in profile, he says nothing.

Thor’s eyes drift back to the bed. “You look to need rest at least as much as I,” he says, soft. “You are all a state, it must be said.”

His head snaps up. “Do you really always compliment people this way?” he asks, and lilts an incredulous laugh to match. “Perhaps it is no great mystery after all, that you have never fathered another bastard.”

“Do _not_ call him that.”

Loki is unmoved by Thor’s flat words. “It is but a truth you must accept, as you would any other. We are not married. The child is a bastard.”

Setting his teeth, Thor manages to smile around them still. “You seem to regard truth as rather fluid, brother mine. I’m surprised you would adhere so strictly to it in this.”

The raised eyebrow comes with a small smile of its own. “But my lies are not the laws of Asgard,” he admonishes with almost gentle force. “And while I might work around one with the other…even I could not do so in something so great as this.”

“But what is marriage but a bond wrought by fate?” Thor insists, great brow furrowing deep. “And we have been joined thus from the moment Father first found you upon that altar, let us not forget that.”

“He made us brothers.”

Thor snorts. “That doesn’t change the first truth of it.”

“The laws of fate and the eyes of Asgard are two different things,” Loki parries, swift as he is in the depths of a flyting, and Thor gives a booming humourless laugh.

“I am the King. They see what I wish.”

Thor expects further argument, but Loki’s head merely moves in soft shake, hair alight with soft gold in the dim glow of the chamber. “Thor. You are yet overtired, and this is too much for you to consider now.” The long pale fingers are light upon his arm even as he gives him a gentle push back. “Go. Sleep. Let Father seek what wisdom he can from the Well, and let me scheme in my shadows.”

He purses his lips, near petulant. “And what shall I do? Wait until I have something to hit with my hammer?”

The answering blink is all innocence. “Well, we must all play to our strengths.”

It seems Loki expects his advice to simply be taken as given; he’s already turning from the great empty bed at the chamber’s centre and his brother beside it, his body still slim silhouette when seen from behind. But before he can take much more than a half-dozen steps the greatest of fool thoughts springs to Thor’s mind.

“But I have something I can strike now.”

The unexpected calling has Loki turning back, eyebrows drawn together. “Oh?”

Thor holds out a hand, draws the fingers in with languid invitation. “Come.”

“Come? Come _where_?” Loki’s eyes, glint with gold in the hazed somnolent light, bear the very beginnings of confusion. “Thor, you haven’t even Mjölnir to hand. And I shouldn’t think Father would be at all pleased should you attempt to summon her through the wall of his deepest chamber.”

“I wasn’t referring to Mjölnir.” And he tilts his head, chooses the wide-eyed look he had perfected as a child whenever he had wished another bite of Iðunn’s choicest apples. “ _Come_ , brother.”

It is so very rare for Thor ever to be in a position where he might surprise Loki. The most precious beauty of the moment comes when his furrowed brow, drawn down over the confusion in his eyes, gives way to sharp startled realisation. “Oh – no. No no _no_ , I know that look, Thor, you mustn’t—”

But his grin is wide and his grip is tight when he leans forward and takes his brother’s unresisting hand. “Come, brother – surely you won’t let me march into this foolishness alone?”

Even as Thor pulls him forward, Loki gives him a look as despairing as it is mischievous. “We should not do this.”

“Says the one who convinced me to take him upon Hliðskjálf.”

Somehow, it had been the wrong thing to say; Loki goes stiff in his grasp, unresponsive. When Thor looks down, he is glaring upward with fierce fury. “Is that what this is, then?” he hisses, eyes alight. “Your need to prove to me that I am fit for a king’s bed, bastard though I already carry in my belly?”

“You are a king, Loki.”

Those eyes widen, and then go narrower still. “No, I am not.”

“But you will not deny that I am a king,” Thor goes on, unperturbed. “And my word is law.”

“Your word is a fool’s dream.”

“A bedchamber is a place for dreaming,” he counters, and then grins. “Amongst other things.”

The faint snort of derision over his brother’s clumsy seduction is still accompanied by a faint smile. Thor takes it as invitation though he feels Loki’s presence as tenuous yet. As his hands move to his belt his heart thunders in the hollow of his great chest, racing in a way it has not in some time; it is swollen with nervousness for all this is not something new between them.

But then perhaps it is. The recent remaking of their relationship has turned everything on its head again, and the end of a war is but the least of it. The fact remains that there are battles yet to be fought before any of this can ever be said to make any sense at all.

Yet it seems somehow easy, to stand beside their father’s bed and strip himself of armour and underclothes alike. He is slow, methodical in a way that he does not often bother to be. And Loki is still, watchful, the ever-shadow at the bedside as Thor bares himself utterly.

He wants to encourage him forward; he wishes in this moment for little else than the pressure of warm leather and cool metal over the heated sheen of his own naked skin. But it is not how it is to be. He climbs upon the bed, knees wide, upon his back, propped up against the furs and thick pillows. And Loki strips, quiet and efficient, pale skin like gold-dust ivory in the glow of the chamber.

When he too is naked Loki comes to him upon his knees, taking his rest between his thighs. Clever hands move first to his shoulders, then trail downwards as if Loki anoints him with runes unseen but ever felt. Something trembles beneath Thor’s skin, current awakened and loosed both as he watches his brother about his work.

The play of his hand over Thor’s side ends with long fingers pressed over that sensitive space just below the terminal rib of the laddered cage above. There is no scar. The strike had not been deep, and the healing stone had been brought to it quick. But Thor feels its ghost still, and from the flare of his eyes Loki sees it true.

“Of course I remember where it was,” he says, so soft as to be near-silent in his reverent regret. “I will always know where and how I have hurt you.”

In answer Thor’s own hand comes forward, and the swell of Loki’s belly is strong beneath the questing trail of his fingers. It has been but four moons, and will grow further yet. Yet it remains something he will never know, not for himself.

_I take life, or I aid in its creation. But I do not carry it, I do not nurture it._

For all he has never thought of such before it seems suddenly a great loss, and that is why he encourages Loki forward, brings him down upon him. But he does not seek the heat for himself. Instead he takes the oil already in Loki’s unresisting hand, flicks the lid free. Then Thor slicks it not over his own hardness, but instead dips dripping fingers low so that they might move into himself.

Loki’s widening gaze locks upon the action of Thor’s long blunted fingers, callused length dipping in and out of his grasping heat. Then he looks up, sees the wide pupils, slim circle of unbroken green about the void of desire.

“Put your life into me, Loki,” Thor whispers. “Make me whole again.”

There is something almost childish in the way he rears back, eyes wide and eyebrows drawn close together. “You…you were never in pieces.” And his eyes move down, to where Thor still works himself open and ready. The silver tongue is near-clumsy where it works over lip, grazing teeth. “And you cannot bear life.”

“Can I not?” He smiles, his mind hazed with the growing pleasure of his own ministrations, the anticipation of his brother’s coming. “For I bear your life in my heart, Loki. And if your life ceased to exist, so too would my heart.”

Loki is trying to snort, to smirk, but instead all Thor can see is deep surprised sadness. “What have I told you, time and again, in regards to your pitiful poetry?” he whispers, and Thor smiles wider yet.

“If the truth of my heart were rendered perfect in meter and verse, would you let yourself believe it then?”

Again Loki has been startled. With eyes so wide he seems suddenly, _terribly_ young, even with the head of his cock pressed against the trembling circle of his brother’s entrance.

“Please believe me,” Thor whispers.

And Loki draws a sobbing breath, dips his head low, and thrusts forward from his hips as much as his heart. It sheathes him deep and Thor closes his eyes as he gives over to it all: the memory of everything upon him, a weight as heavy as it is ephemeral.

From there it is all motion and movement and fierce spiralling pleasure that holds him tight and he never ever wants it to let him go. Loki comes first, trembling and hard against him. When he buries his face in his shoulder, teeth working over his skin as he mutters wordless curse, there is something more. Tears, Thor thinks, but it doesn’t matter. He just holds him close as his own hand closes over his prick, working himself to release until the warmth spreads between them. They are a mess, tangled together upon their father’s bed, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Loki had gone still and so has he, and in that all finally seems right with this small world between them in this golden chamber.

They both drowse, for how long he cannot know. Loki certainly permits it longer, seemingly have fallen far deeper into his half-dreams. Thor’s hand moves over his hip in languid curiosity, dipping closer to the thickened waist. The motion is almost shy as he traces forward over the burgeoning swell of his middle. When Loki makes no protest he becomes bolder yet, spreading his palm entire over the place where their child is nestled. There is a stirring beneath his skin, fluttering and so peculiar that at first he cannot even imagine what it is. Then his eyes widen, voice strangled in his tightening throat.

“Loki!”

One hand rises, closes soft over his brother’s, and he sighs. “No,” he says, soft. “No, it is not the first time.”

Things go quiet between them. Thor closes his eyes, warring with a sense of loss he cannot hope to deny. And Loki follows his train of thought, curves over him in wordless apology for what moments have been lost in the midst of war and separation. “He knows you, Thor,” he whispers, and Thor can only sigh into the darkness.

“But I don’t yet know him.”

“You will.” His hands curve, nails digging deep like roots taking hold in fertile soul. “I swear it.”

Thor lets the silence and the darkness both hold him a moment longer. But he has never been one for grudges, for bitterness cradled close and nurtured until it is become a creature much greater than that which gave it birth. He opens his eyes, blinking against the light they are bathed in, finding it paradoxically both cool and warm.

“I feel as if I have failed you,” he says, finally, and Loki looks up from where he is curled into his side.

“In what manner?” The genuine curiosity is guileless enough to be nearly painful. “Here we both are, you and I. Together with our child in the king’s bed.” And he laughs, low and strange. “I had not quite hoped for this much.”

It hurts, Thor thinks, to remember how Loki had been beneath the hands of the Vanir seiðmaðr. _You did believe_ , his mind whispers, but he does not dare speak so aloud. “And still you did this. All of this,” he says, cautious and curious both. “You risked everything, and what did I do but blunder along like a fool?”

“That was all I wished of you.” One hand trails over his jaw, tender and teasing. “I know how to play your strengths, believe me.”

“ _Loki_.” Thor turns his head, meets Loki’s upon the pillow. “I am serious.”

“And so am I.” Searching eyes dig deep against his soul. “It has ever been this way. You do as you must, as you think is right. I do everything else.”

“If everything had gone wrong, if I had not done as you trusted I would…then you would have been ruined.”

He shrugs. “A willing risk.”

“And why was it willing?” Thor moves closer, his body a trembling instrument on the verge of crescendo. “You made me swear to you once I would not follow you to the halls of Valhalla. Must I force you to promise never to give me cause to need to?”

The fierce whisper moves Loki not. “My life is my own to spend as I will.”

“It is _not_.” Thor’s hand closes about neck, about waist, draws him close. And Loki rolls his eyes at the inevitability of his brother’s grasping grip.

“And so you claim me like a prize?”

He shakes his head, presses lips to his forehead. “My life is bound to yours,” he whispers, and ducks down low again so that their eyes must meet. “I would not break my promise to you easily, Loki. But then it is one I never should have made for I will never rest easy without you by my side.”

Lips purse, twisted and thoughtful. “You would have remade the world entire just so I would love you again.”

The admission comes almost too easy. “I am a fool.”

“But you are _my_ fool.” Such low whisper is barely audible when he adds with soft sorrow: “Almost as much as I am yours.”

Curling into one another is as inevitable as it is natural. Heavy with sleep as both body and mind are, when he trails his hand forward from Loki’s waist Thor can again feel the stirring of their child beneath his palm. With a heart ablaze with warmth and welcome, he cannot hold back his tender question.

“What shall we name him?”

Loki takes so long about his answer that Thor believes him to have given over to sleep; he is tracing faint runes he scarcely understands over the swell of the babe when Loki sighs. “I shouldn’t think I would trust you to name him.” Thor frowns, looks up to meet his wry gaze. “ _How_ many hounds did you name Vánagandr, again?”

“Four.” The resultant exasperation upon his brother’s face leaves him bewildered. “I like the name!”

“It was five,” Loki corrects, sour with certainty, and Thor must laugh for the half-truth of it.

“No, recall that one of them was Fandral’s, yes?”

“And so you name even your boon companion’s dogs the same as your own.” He pinches Thor hard, long fingers as vicious now as they had been when they’d been but children. “No, Thor, you lack imagination. You shall not name my child.”

He scowls, rubbing at his side. “Magni.”

“Magni?”

For all his scepticism, Thor’s surety gives his nod great weight. “Magni.”

The expected argument does not materialise; Loki is in fact silent for a long moment as he stares at the ceiling, one hand over the cradle of his hidden womb. “But he is not yet born,” he says in time, his face an unreadable mask. “One should not expect too much, before the child even takes their first breath.”

But Thor is ever easy as he turns his brother’s face to his, sealing his vow with a light kiss. “I will give him his place. I swear it.”

When he then draws Loki close in his arms, there are no more words between them as they slip into sleep once more. But then Loki always has been apt to believe as he sees fit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In theory I am going to spend November in the coalmines of NaNoWriMo, so I very much wanted to get the story to a reasonable point before then; this seems to be that point given this is the end of the Vanaheimr arc. There are three chapters left and they deal mostly with Loki's heritage and the coming of their child, so...yes. Don't be too worried, though; I may crash and burn within twenty-four hours of November's beginning. Or I may just write more of this in between. My moods and mind are fickle things, and I usually just roll with it.
> 
> But I do swear to you now that this story WILL have its ending, and it WILL be happy...or at least, as happy as this pairing is ever likely to get. Er. <3


	14. And We Shall Play A Game Of Chess

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You know how I said I was going to let this lie through November? I TOLD A LIE, AS IT TURNS OUT. For a variety of reasons I decided not to do NaNoWriMo after all, though I haven't strictly been writing anyway in the interim. Er. But I really want to finish this story before Christmas, and honestly...after this, there are only two chapters and an epilogue left. And I have most of it planned out, so with any luck we're not going to have a huge delay in this concluding arc.
> 
> With that said, this is something of a breather chapter anyway. Despite the ridiculous length of it. Um. But yes, Loki and Thor still have something Rather Important to sort out before they can have anything approaching a happy ending, and these three chapters are where it all begins. [I also keep listening to this gorgeous song](http://claricechiarasorcha.tumblr.com/post/35940200383/i-cant-stop-listening-to-this-mans-voice-damn). Um...but yeah. They're still due a massive throwdown argument over a few things, I can assure you of that.
> 
> As a note, too, I continue playing hard and fast with Norse mythology here; where it differs from what we know of it, that's me just taking artistic liberties. As per usual. Also, there's a little bit later on in the chapter that was inspired by a picture I inspired the lovely Hadehorn to draw [in a completely unrelated conversation](http://hadeshorn.tumblr.com/post/31727149376/so-clarice-mentioned-she-wanted-a-thor-and-loki). Go figure.
> 
> Thank you for sticking with this story for so long. I hope this chapter has been worth the wait. <3 I love you all.

When Thor wakes the sun has moved close to its meridian and he is in his own bed. Startled, it takes him a long moment to process the change though it is hardly the first time he has gone to sleep in one place and woken in another. It is not even the first time he can blame such effect on something other than drink and too-long revelry of nights previous.

He is still rather surprised that he has been allowed to stay abed so long when Vanaheimr remains in a state of unrest despite the surrender of her armies. It will be some time indeed before things change. As he rises he thinks then of Freyja, and of her brother; twinned cousins of the king, for much of their lives they have lived amongst the court of the Allfather, esteemed guests kept for the other’s good behaviour.

Though neither of the siblings had been permitted upon the war councils – despite the twins’ long association with Asgard, the Aesir so rarely see beyond blood and lineage – the question of what is to be done with Nerþuz’s child has already begun its fierce debate. Yet whenever Thor thinks of the girl’s mother, it is not the erstwhile queen he pictures. Rather he remembers Freyja’s pale face as seen when her aunt had been borne into the heart of Glaðsheimr, Barton’s arrow glinting in the golden light reflected from the dreaming spires of the eternal city.

Though she has been seen about the palace in the days since Nerþuz had been given over to Frigga and her healing rooms, Thor has had no chance to speak with Freyja, and has not seen Freyr at all. The urge to speak with her comes on sudden and strong, and he supposes those chambers are as good a place as any to seek her out. There’s still faint regret in that he can sense Loki is elsewhere, a constant quiet presence both in the palace and his heart; it feels to him as if he is in the vicinity of the council chambers.

The wing given over to his mother’s work is broad and sprawling, its balconies and corridors like a continual spiralling vine with spreading petals above and below. As if to mimic her gardens, greenery of many shapes and forms twists through the arches and latticed windows, slipping in soft silence along wall and over door and through balustrade. The air here carries always the faint clean scent of a garden after soft rains, and the fragrance of his mother: if such were a colour it would be gold-touched white ever underlain with the faintest hint of blue.

The open hallways are hushed, always; often he and Loki had been hurried from these hallways as children. Thor hadn’t minded, preferring the weaving halls his mother also frequents most; those are places of laughter and gossip, where life is lived to the rhythm of the waulking songs sung as the women beat the cloth to with their feet. Beneath their willing tutelage Loki had proven quite adept at composing songs both ribald and ridiculous even when he stood but waist-high to the matrons, and then Thor had had feet like thunder to beat out an accompaniment. And oh then how they had chased each other, screaming through the suspended drying cloths of the tenterground—

Thor must halt, closing his eyes against such weight of memory. He does not know why he feels such sorrow when his brother and their childhood are hardly lost to him. But then he had always taken it for granted, that his own children should have the same as they once did.

Few women move through the healing halls this late morning, and fewer men. Still he is stopped often enough, both his own health and that of his father queried after; congratulations and gratitude are offered too for his leadership and skill in bringing about the end of this war. Yet his replies are absent, almost half-hearted. For all the guilt of that his step does not miss a single beat as he continues onwards. There’s a deeper guilt in him now, and one that shall not be denied.

The soft song of his mother can be heard long before he sees her. She is not alone, though only two of her women are with her: Eir, and Fulla. A strange sense of déjà vu shivers over his skin and down his spine, bringing with it the remembered dream of so many days ago, when he had been by Loki’s side as he had given birth to their child.

_(“He is perfect.”)_

_(“He is yours.”)_

_(“He is ours.”)_

He stops dead, all forward motion arrested by a strange sensation of falling. This is even the same room, the same view. But it is not Loki upon the birthing bed that will also become bier. Instead the still form of Nerþuz lies there, the blessed cursed arrow deep in her breast and her belly swollen still with her unborn child.

No-one moves to stop him, but then this is Glaðsheimr and though he bears Mjölnir upon his hip rather than Gungnir in his palm, he is the King of Asgard. None shall deny him what he wants.

_But then they do not truly know what it is that I wish for._

But he is deferent, he is patient, waiting in the opened doorway. Wryly he must acknowledge it has been a lesson long in the making; but a few scant turns of the moons ago he would have strode in without any care at all save for that of the arrogant prince he had been.

Fulla remains quiet to one side, her head bowed; silver-haired Eir stands at the bedside of the erstwhile queen, gnarled fingers upon the still white hand of the mother who will never know her child. It is Frigga who beckons him forward, and for all the light welcome of her smile Thor’s step falters, caught on an uncertain beat. In the delicate light, the ivory latticed windows, pale golden light are as delicate as coloured soap bubbles. Bound in heavy plate and mail armour coloured silver and crimson he feels bulky, conspicuous, _loud_ ; every noise he makes carries the weight of thunder no longer under his control.

Yet her hands stretch out to him, and for all they are offered Thor knows this is not something he can deny. Stepping forward he takes them in his own, and though his are larger he takes deep warmth and comfort from where hers curve close against his callused skin.

“How are you, my son?”

His grip tightens; he can feel the weariness in her fine-fingered hands, though the fierce blue steel in her eyes gives no quarter at all. “I am more concerned for you.”

Her amusement is light, a fierce fragile thing that cannot help but remind him of Loki. “This is what I was born to, Thor. It is hardly something you need be concerned about.”

“But this is not common.”

For a moment it seems she will argue, though she is far more subtle in such matters. Then her brow furrows, lips pursed tight. “No. It is not.” Her eyes move over the silent form of the mother who will be as much in spirit alone, and her sigh holds the weight of worlds. “Shall we walk, perhaps?”

The healing rooms look out over one aspect of Frigga’s great gardens, and it is there they go together, Nerþuz and her daughter left to the care of Eir and Fulla. They are arm in arm as they walk; some part of him hopes to find Loki upon one of the familiar paths, though he knows his brother has not the time for senseless loitering. He himself must be in court within the long hour. Knowing that, with reluctance Thor at last disturbs the contemplative comfort of the silence between them.

“Are you disappointed?”

At first Frigga does not answer, though it surprises Thor not; she was betrothed to Odin from almost the cradle, was raised to be the graceful quiet strength behind the greatest throne of the Nine Realms. She knows both how to watch and weigh her words, and then how to wield them so that they strike heaviest with but a single blow. “I was not best pleased by his fashioning of a solution,” she says with slow calm, though Thor sees the flash of something he would name uneasily as grief in her eyes when she adds, “given his own condition, especially.”

They walk only a few steps more; Frigga stops, ostensibly so that she might move to a low crouch to examine the damp soil beneath one of her favoured rose bushes. Thor gives an awkward shuffle, does not know whether he should move to join her. They both know he has no touch for such things, and there really should be no games between them here.

“Why do you think he did it?”

His question is so honest, so sudden as to be nearly childish. Her fingers dig into the dirt, brushing over strong root, and she closes her eyes. “I know why he did it.” When she turns, her hands are upon her lap, no heed for the white silk of her gown. “Thor, your brother is both wise and very, very foolish.”

He smiles to hear it, though it tastes of salt. “He would not be best pleased to hear you say that.”

“Only because he would know it to be true.” Pressing one hand into the palm he offers, Frigga resumes her feet, carrying about her now the ghost of the rose’s scent. “While he accuses you of reckless behaviour, in many ways he surpasses you indeed in such behaviour.”

He and Loki have spoken so little of it that it is difficulty indeed for Thor to even contemplate bridging such subject with his mother. “Do…do you know what happened in Vanaheimr?” Her hand spasms in his, and he holds it tighter yet, suddenly afraid that she might pull away. “The…first time?”

He has but rarely seen his mother cry. She is a woman of vast intellect and deeper heart, born to be a queen, to be a mother to kings as well as all Asgard itself. In that she has strength enough for all, but she seems bowed beneath the weight of this truth. “I do,” she says, soft, eyes upon the petals between her fingers, soft as the skin of a fresh-born infant. “It breaks my heart, to think a child of mine would think himself so undeserving of love that he would concoct such a plan in order to gain proof of it.” The petals flutter to the path in low-scented fall, her eyes distant as they move to the balconied window of Nerþuz’s birthing-room. “Yet it is the lot of a mother that…”

The faint note of hope in that singular word flutters behind his heart, like a second drumbeat roused to new harmony. “That what?”

Sadness rests true yet in her eyes when she turns to him, but with it comes a flicker of something more he cannot quite identify. “Never mind,” she says, and her hand is soft upon his cheek when she smiles, faces her eldest son. “The child will live, you need not worry for that. You have other duties, my son, and I shall keep you from them no longer.”

Some childish part of him wishes she would – that he could curl at her feet while she works at her loom, cheek pressed to her knee, lost in the scent of aniseed and tealeaf. With a sigh he looks again to the path that weaves between tree and shrub and the cacophony of flower and fruit and kaleidoscope colour, and knows that they will never be but children again.

_Yet my child will know it yet._

“You know the weave of the patterns yet not seen,” he says, soft, and she presses her hand through his arm, locks their elbows together.

“I am but one mistress of the loom upon which the warp threads are in constant tension,” she says in turn, looking up to him with the steady strength that is the hearthstone upon which all Asgard is built. “And the actions that bring the weft into place are the work of all the realms and those within them.”

“Loki always appreciated pretty metaphor more than I,” Thor replies, rueful for all he thinks his heart understands where his mind is still but tangled skein. “And patient as he can be with my failings, I think I shall never be taught to do the same.”

“Ah, but then that is but one of the many reasons why you have one another, I believe.”

Her arm remains curled through his, strong and warm as he walks her back to the healing rooms amongst the haunting scent of the blooming roses. At Nerþuz’s door he takes his leave of the ladies and his mother, and goes little more than one corridor over when he comes across the one he had come searching for. She leans against a railing overlooking the gardens Thor has just walked with Frigga: the youthful form of a lovely goddess, long unbound blonde hair falling in rich curls about rounded shoulders draped in falcon feathers.

“Freyja.” Awkward as he feels, he falls with ease into the long-learned courtly manner as he steps forward, offers a hand. “I am deeply sorry for your loss.”

She extends her own, and it is cool in the circle of his fingers as he raises it to his lips, presses light kiss upon the soft skin. “My aunt did as she saw fit,” she says, her voice light as sorrowful song. “As to will her daughter. That is the way of our worlds.”

Thor has ever found Freyja difficult to read; she is both gregarious and reserved, social and withdrawn. Her soft curves can be childish in one light, and the inviting welcome of sensual womanhood in the other. But she is watchful, and she is wise in ways his own life has never bade him to learn, and thus he remains awkward still when he says: “Given the circumstances, you and your brother might petition that you both are heirs before the child.”

“No, the Allfather removed us both from that succession long ago.” Her chuckle errs on the side of teasing, though her eyes hold a cooler light. “Besides, I have much to do in searching for my lord husband, do I not?”

Thor has never met Óðr. In fact he knows not anyone who has, save for his father and mother. “I have not seen your brother,” he says instead, leading; Freyja tilts her head to one side, follows with easy grace.

“He has spent much of his time hunting in the far northern mountains. I am sure he would come back to Glaðsheimr at your call, should you have need of his counsel or his swordarm.”

There’s no accusation there, directed either to him or to her brother. Freyr had not been required to take up arms against his own trueborn home, and in truth Thor has never had much time to speak to him of the war; in fact Thor has not seen him since Loki razed the remains of fallen Nóatún to ash and blackened bone. “What will he make of Nerþuz’s betrayal and death?”

“What he always has.” His confusion must show upon his face for she raises a hand to cover her laugh, long dagged sleeves brushing the engraved marble of the floor below. “My brother makes of his life what he will,” she explains, the words simple though her eyes hold an endless litany of things he might never understand. But then he has long known himself that the world that a pair of siblings are born and raised to can often be something no outsider can ever expect to enter.

“Would you return to Vanaheimr?” he asks, sudden. “As guardians to the child?”

He doubts it is a fresh idea to her mind; certainly it is one that has already been floated at several gatherings, and though Freyja has not attended any of them she has her little birds about the palace and the city. She is thoughtful now, face turned to the gardens again. For not the first time he notes a red hint to her eyes that makes them appear indigo; something different entirely to Snotra’s violet.

“You would have my brother and I live together as mother and father to the child of our aunt by our uncle?” Her lips, the rich promise of sin and sensuality, quirk upward in curious amusement. “How very…circular.”

“Does it seem so wrong to you?” he asks, stiff, not entirely sure what answer he even wishes of her.

“No.” And her smile is a secret thing now, a sad sharp edge to the crimson curve. “No, I rather think it does not.”

Thor’s heart tightens. “I am glad for it.”

“As well you might be.” She bows her head, the thick golden curls like spun gold about her shoulders. “But do let us know what the Allfather makes of your…solution.”

It is hard to know what Freyja sees from her place both within and without the Aesir. But Before he can think of any other reply she glides forth, wrapped close in her feathered mantle. He hardly blinks before she is gone, as if she had taken wing and flown quite away.

 

*****

 

Loki does not come to dinner. A page brings his brother’s regrets; he has been in enclave with several members of one of the high councils regarding his impressions of the state of Vanaheimr’s politics after his own time with Nerþuz, and his presence at the fall of Nóatún. There’s guilt to be found in that, too; Thor should be part of these councils, should not leave his brother alone to hash over the details of what had happened there.

But then it seems all know him for the warrior king he was born to be, and that it is Loki who strides best the battlefield afterward: in the company of the carrion birds and beasts who pick over the bones and flesh and the land they lie upon.

Even had Loki been there, Thor does not think he would have had much appetite. He will go to him, he decides, though his mother’s raised eyebrow keeps him in place for courtesy’s sake. Yet when he rises at the conclusion of the meal, his intention quite determined, a presence at his elbow stops him dead.

“Thor.”

“Sif.” There’s a flicker of annoyance, undeserved and unworthy; in penance he gives a smile that he means in true sentiment, if not just this moment. “I thought you were returning to Vanaheimr.”

“On the morrow.” Despite her reflexive disapproval of the fact such action is still needful, fierce pleasure flares in her eyes when she speaks next; war is a cruel and cutting fact, but there are simply those who were born to wield its blades and sling its arrows. “There are still knots of resistance, as you well know.”

“Yes.” And his own blood, born of the Allfather and the spirit of war itself, burns yet to shed that of others in the service of his realm. “You know that I too would ride out—”

“The king should remain in Asgard,” she interrupts, smooth and courtly for all the feral light in her eyes. “The war is won. This is but sport.”

“It is never merely _sport_.”

The vehemence of the words surprises him, but Sif seems unmoved. “No, it is not.” And her head moves to one side, gaze searching. “Though in truth that is not something I thought to ever hear from your lips.”

“And what is that to mean?”

They stand upon the edge of the great dais where the high table sits, and though their conversation is but low there are others who take in the escalating tension of their stances and find it curious; Bragi in particular seems like to join them, and Sif places her hand on his lower vambrace, voice inviting no disagreement. “I want to talk to you.”

Thor thinks of Loki, distant and apart from him. “I am no mood to talk.”

“And that is why I ask.” The golden light is brilliant in the high hall, but Sif’s eyes are all dark storm promise when she tilts her chin upward, lips pressed together in firm challenge. “Come with me, Thor. Let me give you this.”

Beyond the warm halls bathed in golden light, the night is dark and cast not even in light silver; the sky is rife with weighted cloud, the rainfall like liquid ice upon his skin when he briefly examines the training ground. Such ill weather is not even entirely his own doing, though he can feel the charge building upon the air, a dance with coiled death waiting for but the first beat to begin.

Sif has dressed in light armour with her quarterstaff unbladed, grip wrapped in thick leather upon which the fallen water beads. But her grasp upon the weapon is firm, her eyes watchful, hair long and braided.

Thor himself wears little more than tunic and trousers, his feet bare. They will slip and slide in this mud, their footing uncertain and hard-won with every step they dare to take. But as he selects a wooden training blade of his own, moving out from the shadows of the salle into the grim evening light, he thinks perhaps that is the point.

She strikes first. He had expected as much of her. But for all her quick temper, Sif is not given over to emotion, she is not slaved to her instincts. Rather she rules them, a woman of action and swift wisdom. Her first blow is an upward thrust, body held low and steady; he parries it with a grin constructed of little more than teeth and drawn-back lip, and takes a step back.

Her eyes cast over him, watchful and quick. Already they are both drenched, and when he presses his hair back from his face he thinks perhaps he ought to have bound it back. Yet there is something wild about its loaded weight, the caress of ionised water as his tongue flicks out and tastes it, and the air is thick with ozone and the promise of charge.

“Shall we dance?”

She cocks an eyebrow. “Shall I lead?”

And she waits for no answer – Sif waits for no man. She comes at him in a flurry of strike and parry, dancing just out of his reach; he is quick enough, but his bulk is no match for the easy grace of her flexible form. It is a merry chase she would lead him upon, and he cares not for how foolish it might seem to any who watch them at such lethal play. They are no longer children, duelling with twigs for swords and bark for shields, shrieking with laughter as they move about the meadow on uncertain feet.

This is the level below the berserker where it is not blood they seek but _truth_ ; only in such reaction can the truth behind each action be laid bare. And until she evades a high swing, dipping low and dropping her quarterstaff, he had not known how much bitter anger lies in him. She wraps her arm about his waist, taking his weight upon herself as she throws her own backward, and he is flying through the air in graceless fall, only at the last moment tucking himself so that a shoulder hits first, so that he might too roll and find his own centre.

They have no weapons after that. They have no need of them. Thor is a writhing mass of unleashed fury, wherein he needs nothing more than his own self to express the frustration he has felt since Vanaheimr – since the very first moment Loki has been taken from him. It will not end it, some part of him knows this. In the end he and Loki have yet to shout and struggle this out as is inevitable between them, and them alone.

But in this Sif is his equal, his companion, his _friend_ ; her body is strong and lithe and surrenders nothing, her every blow tactical and knowing of his every strength and weakness while he knows so much of hers. In this they might fight to a standstill, to an ending where neither win nor lose. But the thunder crashes overhead and the sky is lit up with forked lightning and his blood sings and his laughter rumbles loose from the tightness of his chest and they grapple in the mud and in that he thinks it likely does not matter at all.

The rain is a light patter when he loses his footing for the last time, going down hard; Sif is upon him, elbow pressed hard to his throat. He raises one hand in the easy signal of yield, lets it fall back with filthy splash. Her face, a mask of concentrated aggression, falters; a moment later she is leaning back upon his thighs, lips twisted. She shoves herself to her feet and Thor thinks that he has miscalculated, and badly. But then her hand is thrust forward, and for all the mud that coats them both her grip is strong and sure when she pulls him to his feet.

“You wanted me to win.”

He shakes his head. “Sif—”

“But then I think you had taken as much as I could give you.” And now she is suddenly uncertain, though no-one can truly deny the right she has to this question. “Thor, tell me. What did Loki do?”

He cannot stand for this. When he drops back down to the ground, the taste of blood and dirt is metallic and earthy upon his lips, his tongue, making his voice rasp heavy in his throat. “I know this for certain, from his own lips: he set it up…the failed hunt in Vanaheimr, our capture by the seiðmaðr, the abuse he suffered at their hands.” And he looks up to her, slim silhouette against the sudden strike across the sky. “Because he did not believe I would want him unless it was a choice between his death and our joining.” And his fury is as much despair as rage, the thunder heavy upon the air until the very last word. “That I would not take him upon his own merits, but only to save him, myself, and my dearest friends!”

Her face contorts. As the thunder rolls across the sky, she snatches up her quarterstaff, flings it across the training ring. It splinters against a far wall, her scream pure berserker fury. But when she looks back, eyes wild, her voice is low and wondering. “I knew it. I knew it always. Your brother is _mad_.”

And he is weary now, and not just in physical body. “Sif, there is more to it than that.”

For a long moment she says nothing, a furious vibrating creature held upon the very edge of vicious violence. But she does not throw herself over, she does not give in. Instead she turns her head, pale skin revealed in long lines beneath the mud that coats her like a second skin. “He is not your brother,” she murmurs. “He never was.”

“He _is_. Now and always.” Thor’s hands fist in the dirt, drenched in rainwater charged by divine desire. “But by bond, and not blood.”

Again, Sif holds her silence; in that she is more like Frigga than she might ever have believed herself capable. Then with a sigh she falls down at his side, long limbs loose and exhausted, her face a weary open book. “So it is true, then? What Sigrdrífa said?” But she wants for no answer of his, turning her face to the sky so that the rain might wash it clean, running in long rivulets down the open neck of her tunic. “Loki is… is _Jötunn_.”

Thor looks to his own hands; cupped now, the water forms a pool that is yet too shallow to make out his own reflection. “He is Laufey’s son.”

She expels all breath with a long groan, and her hands grope for his. “Oh, by the _Norns_ …”

Sif has never been one for small gestures of comfort and consolation, and Thor takes her offered touch, holds back tight as if she is his only anchor in storm-tossed seas. “It is as I told you before: the child is subject to a prophecy.” The words wedge like jagged glass deep in his throat. “An heir born of blood both of the Jötnar, and the Aesir. I am of the Aesir, Loki is of the Jötnar…and that is where it began, I think. Why he did these things. It was not without reason, without sacrifice…because Loki is determined to subvert the fate both he and his child have been given over to, in any way he knows how.”

It is not something to be taken light, nor easy; his own heart echoes her shriek when she turns to him, eyes wild. “He should never have conceived it!” she says, and there is horror and pity alike in her words. “Thor, I know it is your child, but surely you must…surely you must _think_ …”

“I think it was inevitable.” Perhaps he should feel shame in this confession, but in the end it is more relief when he adds, soft, “in the end I believe no matter the circumstance, this would have happened one way or the other.”

Her eyes are so wide the whites ring her irises. “You truly believe you would have…” Nails dig deep into his hand, leaving bruises shaped like tiny crescent blood-moons. “…without _that_ mummery?”

“It was not mummery entire.” He closes his own hand over hers, finding her knuckles bruised and bleeding and strong. “He might have arranged for the pieces to fall into place as they did, but he paid dearly for what he did. And he fell with them.”

“Hardly penance enough, I should think.”

Thor remembers the misery of those long days in that small cell, the fear that underlay the fury. But most of all he remembers the agony of never knowing _why_ – why they were there, why they were kept there, why such things must happen. Yet he thinks now that even when the reason is known it cannot be enough to justify such suffering.

His voice turns low. “In some ways his entire life has been penance for being born what he was,” he says, and he cannot help the flare of resentment at their father, for all Odin’s actions have been at the very heart of what has allowed for this shifting of the very fates themselves. “Sif, you do not need to understand—”

“But I _do_. I do need to understand.” Her hands spasm within the circle of his, and then she is pulling back, face turned away. “Thor, I will not stand by and let him hurt you like that again.”

There is only one truth he can offer her now, though he believes now there are few who can take it. “It was needful.”

She has stood again, her pacing uneasy. And yet he is grateful to her; his own body is heavy with fatigue, but paradoxically lighter of all that has drawn him down. And she knows it, too; there is reluctance in her when she turns, offers what she has always given him, what he has always treasured her for: the truth unadorned, simple as his own love and honour. “He has a silver tongue! Could he not just _speak_ of how he feels?”

“I understand action better.” One hand rises, casts about the arena; the mud is churned from one side to the other, memory of their relentless fight engrained into the very soil of Asgard itself. Even in the dim light, her cheeks colour; with a wry grin he reaches out a hand. Again she hefts him to his feet, and does not let go.

“Thor, do you truly mean to tell Asgard of his true heritage?”

When he looks up, the clouds have begun to part; the stars are in their endless tapestry behind, brilliant aurora and the curve of galaxy behind the orrery of planet and moon that twists about their eternal centre. “Yes.” And he looks to her, feeling both terribly young and so very old when he sees her uncertainty, her worry, her fear. “Because I believe it is the only way they will accept Loki as the mother of my heir.”

She looks as if she wishes to cry, or to perhaps take up again her quarterstaff and beat him about the head until some semblance of sense takes root within. “You are always and ever such a damned fool,” she whispers, and he only smiles.

“Loki often says so.”

And she turns her head, shaking all the while. “And the Norns help you both.”

“I think we may be on our own for this.”

But she is the one who had helped him lurch to his feet from the mud, and she is there every step of the way as they return inside, guided by the spill of rich golden light to the warm promise of the baths within.

 

*****

 

“There’s something you never explained to me.”

At first Loki says nothing, head bent to his work; Thor can see from this angle that the books surrounding him are tomes both of magic and of political lore. He steps close, takes a seat beside him. Only when he drums his fingers, loud and tuneless, for the turn of a timepiece does Loki look up, answer as if Thor had only but spoken a moment before.

“What was that?”

“How you knew.”

“How I knew what?”

Given Loki spends most conversations several paragraphs ahead of the other participants, Thor knows he’s being purposely obtuse. With a sigh he balances his chin upon a fisted hand, watches him flick the pages of his book. “Where you were born.”

Loki’s fingers pause, then turn another. “Ah.”

The stylus scratches over the parchment before him, Loki’s writing very neat but still unreadable to Thor’s eyes; he’s never cared much for the ancient and ritual languages that the Alltongue does not easily render known. “Are you not going to tell me?” he asks finally, and Loki snorts and does not pause.

“Do you really believe it relevant?”

He has had enough difficult conversations with his brother to realise that this is very thin ice upon which he stands, and the chances of it bearing his clumsy weight are slim. But then he has ever been one to blunder forward when others would think first to hold their ground, or even retreat. “You do not have to bear such burdens alone, Loki. That is what I believe.”

Those clever hands still. Then he looks up, eyes thoughtful. “It was a toll I paid.”

“A toll?”

“Yes.” Looking down at his book, again. “Three summers ago, I went travelling, do you remember?”

_Three summers_. Time is long to the Aesir, and three seasons is but a drop in the great endless ocean that is their near-immortal lives. But he is staggered all the same, his heart twisted in a knot he does not think will be easily undone. “You have known _so long_?”

“Yes.”

His head is heavy in his hands, eyes clenched tightly shut, stomach a roiling mass beneath the ache of his heart. “Loki—”

A raised hand falls upon his shoulder, fingers digging deep into tense muscle. “ _Stop_.”

“I should have realised.”

“But you did not. And I did not expect it of you.”

“And I am deserving of your low expectations.”

Loki snorts, and when his hand passes over his hair, the smooth passage stops when he tugs on it. Thor looks up caught between irritation and guilt, and Loki’s answering gaze is all light exasperation. “This isn’t about you,” he says, almost pitying when he lets go his hair, smoothing it back behind one ear before his hand falls gentle away. “It was a toll, Thor. I went further than I should have, on the far western reaches of Yggdrasil’s lower branches.” Loki has almost retreated in upon himself now, arms crossed over his chest and his lips pursed. “I wished to cross a river.”

“What river? One of the Élivágar?”

“It doesn’t matter.” But the furrow of his brow suggests otherwise, Loki’s words heavy with a confusion that is not at all suited to his silvered tongue. “I am not certain it _had_ a name. Which is rather an irony in and of itself.”

“How far out were you?”

“I walk the deep paths, Thor. The shadowed paths. I had to have found them by some process of elimination, yes?”

Despite the half-rhetoric of the question Thor scarce has any true thoughts, let alone words as he stares. From a very young age he had known Loki for what he is: his clever little brother always inquisitive and questioning, as careless with the consequences of those answers as he can be with his methods of acquiring them. But whether his intent had been mere curiosity, or something more malicious, he cannot know from his expression. Perhaps he shall never know.

And it is not what matters now. “What was the nature of the toll? And the one who asked it?”

“The one who took it,” Loki corrects, and he sounds tired. “I did not walk these paths as myself, though it’s a fool thought to think one might ever hide their true self upon such conduits. It was more shield from others upon it than those who made it themselves.” His hands tighten, reflexive and harsh. “All the ferryman asked of me was my name.”

A shudder rocks through him. “You denied him that?”

“I gave him the false name I travelled under. Of course he denied it, as well he might. I had expected it.” Loki is almost careless in this tale, as he can be over the epics he will retell at the high table for the king and his court. But there’s an edge to it all, something frenzied and frenetic that lurks beneath every word even as he fixes his gaze upon him. “I did not give him another immediately. I played the game for as long as I could, flyting and skirmishing all with epithets which by rights are genuinely my own.”

Such games are not for Thor to play; he would much rather take his hammer and smash all resistance to dust. But he can see the light in Loki’s eyes, stoked embers of gleeful memory. “And yet it was not somehow enough.”

“Names have power. And the more I played this game with him, the more I craved to know what power he bridged.” Loki’s eyes have gone distant with memory, as if he relives those moments rather than merely recalling them for an audience; leaning back in his chair, he casts his face to the ceiling and frowns. “In the end I gave him what he asked for, or so I thought: _by birth, the first of all your names_.”

“Odinson.”

“Odinson,” Loki repeats, low as a distinct shake enters his voice. “And his only answer was: _before that_.” He leans forward with a snap, hands slapping hard against the polished grain of the wood. “I thought it a riddle, and a damned fool one. I was angry. I left him there, cursing his own fool name, whatever it might be.”

The truth of that prickles over his skin, uncomfortable, and Loki will not look at him. “So you do not know it? Even now?”

“I have never returned to that place.” The bitterness is hollow, the line of his face sharp where it is turned in profile. “I am as craven a coward as they name me, the seiðmaðr prince who is not even blood of the realm that has no care for him even when they believe otherwise.”

Again, words seem so inadequate for such weight upon bowed shoulders, even for those blessed with talent for such things. Thor feels heavier still as he edges closer, chair scraping inelegantly across the floor. “I am sorry I never realised before now that fear in you.”

Loki looks up, body curving slightly away from the greater bulk of his brother’s. “What fear?”

But Thor moves closer still, for all he does not quite dare to take his brother in his arms. “That you were underserving of the Allfather’s blood,” he murmurs, and does not let Loki look away. “But then it’s not blood that binds him to you. Or me, besides.”

That searching gaze has a well-whetted edge to it, yet Loki turns almost kind when he says: “I would suggest you leave such philosophical posturing to our father and keep instead to your hammer, brother mine.”

It’s not a command without good reason, and Thor’s grin is lop-sided, fading only when he takes up the thread of the conversation in his clumsy fingers. “But you didn’t let it go.”

“As you so artfully noted, it was hardly the first time someone had called into question my worthiness as an Odinson.” Wryness becomes weariness in the space of but a moment, his eyes dropping sideways. “I might have ignored it…but it was old magic. Very old magic, as it were.” His face is drawn in haunted childish lines, voice scarce more than a whisper. “And for all I did not recognise him, I believe even now he recognised me.”

Thor’s mouth goes very dry. “He must have, to have such truth of you.”

And Loki turns away one last time. “And he was right, as it turns out.”

He will not look at him, but Thor reaches over, places one hand over Loki’s, holds it tight. Loki’s other has wandered to his belly; there it moves in thoughtful, slow circle.

“Your child will know his true name.’

He snorts, does not look up. “You are an innocent.”

“ _Me_?”

“In all the ways that matter, yes.”

Much as his pride tells him to dispute such judgment from a younger brother, Thor looks down to his palms and says not a word. His mind is instead filled with what little he understands of them: the eleven cold rivers, all stemming from the wellspring Hvergelmir. He does not doubt Loki would know those well. Certainly he will have often enough followed Gjöll to the bridge Gjallarbrú in order to cross to Helheimr. That Loki should come across a nameless river, and a stranger upon it who has since changed everything Loki thought he once knew…

_Because we all drink of the Well of Urðr._

“Do you remember the dragon you named Níðhöggr?”

The sudden subject change leaves Loki wary, watchful as his eyes move up. “Yes. What of him?”

“I think you know.”

Loki’s quick mind will not fail him now, and Thor can see as much in the way his eyes drop downward to where his open hands have taken a faint tremor. Thor remembers the baby as he had been, how well the tiny creature had fit into even such childish palms. A peculiar vagrancy of fate, wherein a great warrior had come home to Asgard with the head of a dragon and four eggs that were neither as inert or infertile as first presumed.

In some ways the single dragonling who had emerged from that stolen clutch had been the first of Loki’s children: precious, something of his own destined to be taken away. Loki’s eyes have closed now, palm pressed over his belly until the tremor is hidden entire.

“I will not let you go.” Likely as not he is bruising Loki’s hand, where he grips it so tight. “Either of you.”

“What if this child is but a dragon who will never learn his place?”

“Níðhöggr did not belong in Asgard. He never did.” Thor aches with the memory of it; for all the dragon had been his brother’s beloved companion until all had burned to ash, he had known his brother’s agony in that first loss. And his hand moves over his abdomen, face pressed into his throat. “You do, Loki. You do.”

“I am no more of this realm than Níðhöggr.”

“You were not born here,” he agrees, because truth has never been malleable in even his strong hands, “but the Allfather himself raised you to be my brother – but now we are grown, we can choose where it is where we will be.” He looks to Loki then. “What we shall be.”

His smile is small, something quite sad as he turns his head, rising. “I have heard enough, I believe.”

But Thor does not count this as defeat; for all Loki’s face is turned from him, his stance and carriage is as proud as ever. “Our child will have his place,” he says, the pronouncement carrying all the weight of both a named god of thunder and a crowned prince-king of the realm eternal.

Yet Loki seems almost pitying when he looks back. “Thor,” he says, and it is both warning and soft reproach. Thor will have none of it, raising one hand to halt it in its tracks.

“I swear this to you.” And that hand closes to a fist, rests over the quickened beat of his great heart. “My life is for you, and for our son.”

Loki stares at him as if he has grown another head entire; even as Thor moves to step forward, to pull him into an embrace that will not be denied, he turns his face away. “I should go to Mother. She has been asking for my assistance.”

Having fought so many battles of this kind over the years Thor knows better than to fight to win something already lost. “Loki?”

He half-turns. “Yes?”

“I love you.”

At first Loki looks to not have understood a single word that Thor has just said. Then he smiles, low and shadowed. “I know.” And he is gone, the pages of one book fluttering to a standstill as it closes seemingly of its own accord.

 

*****

 

Two days pass and in that time Thor has scarce seen his brother. It is not unexpected; given the worsening condition of their royal patient Loki has spent much of his time in the healing rooms with Eir and Frigga while Thor has had his own duties to attend to with various council both large and small. But they are together this eve – as is much of the city, gathered to watch the funeral longboat of Nerþuz set alight before it is pushed from the very edge of the world.

One of the finest archers waits upon the city’s high wall, bow drawn with blazing arrow notched to set it alight. There is a cluster of people down on the shore where the boat is given over to water, though the vast majority stand ranged upon the rainbow bridge. They are themselves towards its terminal end, Heimdall’s ever-watchful gaze upon them both. It almost makes him squirm. As a child he had done much the same whenever he had known the wrongness of something and done it all the same. When it came to nerve and consequence, it was always the thought of Heimdall’s certain knowledge that came first. Then, he would consider Loki, and whether his brother would be amused or exasperated by his elder brother’s latest antics. And then he would consider his mother and wince at the thought of her disappointment – and in the end, finally, there was ever their father and the justice of the Allfather held in heart and staff and wise one eye.

Loki stands very close to him now, so much so that Thor can feel the rise and fall of his chest. There’s nothing unusual in that; his younger brother has ever been his shadow, and the people of Asgard are used to seeing two so close as to be sun and shadow in one. But he wishes to pull him close against his side, to have arm about waist and face pressed to throat. Yet even for the brothers of Asgard’s golden throne it would be too much.

_Now, at least. One day it will be but as the golden spires of Glaðsheimr – eternal and endless, Asgard itself made flesh in the bodies of her kings._

Frigga stands nearby with her ladies-in-waiting arrayed about her in refracting pattern; all are dressed in white, golden hair piled with flowers and thick with the scent of perfume. The child is not with them, and for that he cannot decide whether to be sorrowful or glad. He has not seen the girl, does not even know if she had yet been given a name, or even if Frigga will do so or grant that privilege to her aunt and uncle.

Loki has likely held the last daughter of Vanaheimr’s king. Given his crafting of the spell that had held Nerþuz in that liminal state, his presence at the birth had been all but mandatory. But it not a question Thor knows how to ask, even when he recalls the conversation he had had with their mother.

Loki surprises him, his voice soft and yet clear over the low murmuring of the crowd as Nerþuz’s longboat ends its last blazing journey, falling off the edge of everything that matters.

“I almost miss Midgard.”

“What?”

His eyes, dark even in the fierce golden spiral song of the galaxies about Asgard, do not rise from the fire. “Perhaps I should return there,” he says, soft. “To summer, as it were.”

“To hide.”

Those flatly given words have Loki turning at last, one fine eyebrow quirked upward. “It would be better, would it not?”

“Yes, it might be,” he answers, though Thor knows that Loki’s questions are often anything but. “But only if I was not determined that you need never hide again.” Now his voice takes on a harder tone, generous lips downturned. “If I actually believed you would go there.”

“Where else would I go?”

Loki’s feigned innocence is masterful, but Thor knows too much to fall for anything so simple as that this eve. “Jötunheimr.”

“Why, brother, anyone would think you do not tru—”

“This is nothing to do with me trusting you,” Thor returns, sharp; his hands have closed tight about his brother’s arms, drawing him close. “It is everything to do with _you_ trusting _me_.”

At first he says nothing, blinking dark eyes up at his brother. As the spark of his sudden anger begins to gutter Thor begins to feel the weight of other eyes upon them, though Loki looks nowhere else but to him. “We should not discuss this here,” he murmurs, and for all Thor knows the truth of that his frustration is bright; he has spent too many years in his brother’s company to quite trust Loki deferring any conversation.

“Then where shall we discuss it? And when?”

Loki steps back, elegant false shadow. “Come with me.”

They take their leave of their mother first, and then the assorted nobles of the court whose curiosity is stilled only by Frigga, who wears the smile of the queen and bears the eyes of a blooded warrior.

Still Thor feels Sif’s watchful eyes rest upon his back as they walk back together along the bridge. So many of the citizens have come out to watch it go past, and it seems as though every one of them must give their hail to the king, and the Odinsons. He raises his own hand, grasps wrists in the warrior’s shake, gives words of greeting and blessing; Loki scarcely glances at a single one as they return to the great golden gates of the city.

There are horses waiting for them, their reins held by stablehands, though they ride back together and alone. Nothing of the ride is hard, but nor is it not slow. The horses are content when they leave them at the gates, walk inside, curved towards one another like twinned trees that share the same roots. There are still servants about the corridors of the palace, minimal as they are this evening, but Thor does not quite dare to touch his brother until they are in his rooms.

Yet Loki slips away from the hand he reaches out even when the doors are closed. Thor in turn does not truly realise his weariness until he takes a chair; the fire is already lit, yet somehow he still feels cold. Loki is restless upon his feet, pacing; it almost makes Thor dizzy to watch his relentless motion. “You said in the Odinsleep chamber that you plot,” he says finally, four fingers pressed to his temple. “I know you will not rest on your laurels over this.”

Loki pauses, one hand upon the mantel. “And you?” The lightness of those words is calculated, a dark hole invent one to take a fall. “Tell me brother, how is _your_ rest upon your laurels?”

He frowns. “What do you mean?”

Loki’s laughter is rich sudden scorn. “Oh, you work to make a place for that little girl, do you not? I’ve not been consulted directly on it thus far, no, but I have my ways and my means. I know that you would have Freyja and Freyr made her parents despite the fact there will be argument against it.” And his face contorts, sudden and fierce. “But what of your child?”

“Loki, you know as well as I that this must be dealt with,” he said, and though confusion is paramount he can feel his instinctual need to be obeyed rising. “And that is what I am doing, as king while Father is gone – I am making sure that this peace will hold.”

“And in the meantime I shall continue to skulk and hide in the shadows, hiding my growing belly for shame of how I came by it.” The smile he wears is little more than sharp edges, broken glass shimmering like unshed tears. “But then I always have. What difference should a little more time make?”

A headache blossoms behind his eyes, and he can still taste smoke and incense upon his dry tongue and lips. “Loki, do not do this now. You know I do not wish to hide this. I never did, from the very beginning.”

“Which was pure foolishness,” he snaps back, fingers curling and uncurling in rapid ineffectual motion. “Consider it, Thor: what did you think would happen? That you would stand before all the court and the citizens of Asgard and say that not only had you had carnal relations with your younger brother, but that you had impregnated him and he now will bear the heir to the throne?”

His lips press so tight together as to be nearly bloodless. “I would have done it. Do not ever believe I would not have done it.”

“I do believe you would have done it – and it would have been carnage.” Stepping quickly to him, Loki traps his face between his hands, bent forward from the waist, hair hanging wild about his shoulders in their shining ceremonial armour. “I don’t think you even realise what it would have done – to them, to _you_ ,” he says, fierce, fingers digging deep. “You are used to being loved, brother mine. It would have been a great shock to you, to have lost that.”

It cannot be denied; his heart is tight yet with the memory of it. “I’ve known that shock,” he says, soft. “I know what it is to have a love one has built their life upon taken away like a tide that is never to return.”

Loki is very still, eyes wide and wary. Then his hands fall away, and his back is turned. “You have known that.” The quiet regret cannot mask the frustration still clear beneath it. Thor rises, crosses to where his brother stands still before the hearth.

“Loki, what are you planning to do?”

He does not look up from the dance of the flame. “Nothing you need have a hand in.”

Again his hands close over his upper arms. Thor knows he is hurting him, can all but feel the bruises blossoming beneath his stiffened fingers. “You will not do this alone.”

“Because I carry your child?” Loki rolls his eyes, bright and gleaming in the crimson-touched light. “I am not such a fool as Nerþuz, brother, there is no need to worry on that account.” The smile he wears then is both as terrible as it is triumphant. “Besides, I have done much the same for my own self.”

Thor goes very cold. Then, he goes very hot. “ _What_?”

“Should something happen to me, the child will live on.” The smile grows wider, abruptly falters, but Loki never once drops his certain gaze as he gives this last truth. “As long as my body is returned mostly intact, the babe will not suffer for it.”

“ _What are you planning to do_?” Roared. Fury and disbelief. Loki stands very still beneath the onslaught, eyes narrowed now; his chuckle is short and very sharp.

“I do not _plan_ to die,” he says, skirting so close to careless. “But should my spirit be called elsewhere, I will not leave you bereft.”

Thor cannot know what is worse: that Loki should think so little of his own worth, or that he should believe the same of Thor. “Without you then what do I have?”

When Thor’s voice cracks upon the last word Loki’s eyebrows knit together, confusion palpable upon his features. “Your heir.”

“No.” Thor shakes him now, voice rising in thunderous shout. “No, you cannot do – whatever it is that you plan!” Now all care for pain is gone, his own fury edging close to complete control of his body. “Must I bind you, mouth and hand and foot—”

Loki jerks free, pale face like a mask promising swift death to all those who would think to look beneath its beauty as his hands clench to fists. “If you dare, I will castrate you myself.”

The air crackles between them, charged and challenging; but a second later Thor fists his own hands, bites down hard upon his temper, searching for something more temperate even as he speaks through gritted teeth. “Loki, I do not mean to—”

“You never _mean_ to be cruel,” he interrupts, one hand moving in flighty dismissal. “And yet you are. You always have been – so careless and casual about your cruelties.”

Much as he has no wish to argue with his brother, not in this, not _now_ , his roused temper has never been something easily tamped down when the embers have been fanned to full flare. “How is that worse than being sly and knowing about them? Wielding silver words like daggers as you twist them deep into every place you know will bleed most?”

He had known from the beginning it would be a mistake to engage Loki in this way. But even as he feels disappointment, his tensed muscles screaming for the release of battle and blood, Loki turns his back; like a sparking shadow of true storm he strides out, leaving only silence in his wake.

At first the bang of the door leaves Thor still, frozen in place, caught upon the cusp of action and reaction alike. Then, he lets it all go, fury bleeding from him, pooling impotent upon the floor. Deep instinct tells him that he should rise from the chair, but then he is in no mood for it. Loki will not go anywhere, not now. Thor may not understand his brother’s schemes or what that quicksilver mind plans now, and yet he cannot believe Loki would leave Asgard, would leave matters between them in this uneasy configuration.

_Unless he planned it this way. Unless he expects you to chase after him, furious and fierce with singing Mjölnir to hand – and there you will be, pursuing chaos itself all through the icefields of grim Jötunheimr, the stormlord called to his divine duty._

Thor closes his eyes. _It can wait for morning._ And for all Loki has so often named him a fool he does not doubt himself in this. He might have no idea of the passage of time, drifting as he does between light doze and true sleep, but there is a warmth in the place beside his breastbone that pulses in time with the thunder of his heartbeat. It speaks of child and mother both, a constant presence never far from thought or hand. Despite the ache of his head, he smiles, and drifts deeper yet.

He hears no-one enter, senses no company, wakes just at a gentle shake of his arm. His warrior instinct should drive him to his feet, Mjölnir summoned to hand, but this is his home – both in physicality, and in the person who summons him back from vague dream.

“Loki?”

His brother is half-blurred silhouette as he forces his eyes open, blinking against the bright light. Something warm presses against his palm, fingers moving to hold it with languid reflex. “Drink this.”

When he raises it to his dry lips, he finds sweet scent – almost too sweet, and familiar besides. He’d discovered in childhood such elixirs were purposely brewed so in order to disguise the bitterness of the analgesic within. And like a child he purses his lips, lets it descend untasted. “I am fine.”

“You are not.”

Loki punctuates the words with a light slap to his forearm; Thor’s eyes fly open, giving him a wounded look. Loki’s returned gaze is pure maternal disapproval, and it is lessons learned at Frigga’s knee that have him raising the cup again, drinking deep. “Only to satisfy you,” he says, mulish and not bothering to hide his grimace. “For you are the one who should be coddled, not I.”

Rather than reigniting his earlier ire, Loki appears amused as he sets the cup aside, half-turning to poke at the embers of the fire. “When have I ever enjoyed being coddled, Thor?”

Much as he must be able to feel Thor’s eyes upon him, Loki does not look up. He frowns. His brother has always been independent as a cat, quite willing to take his own counsel in the shadows rather than stoop to asking others for aid or assistance. With a shake of his head Thor rises, bites back on a wince. It will take some time for the analgesic to take effect – but there are lines of tiredness in his brother’s face, a weary song unsung that he cannot ignore.

“I am sorry.”

In return Loki gives only a light shrug. Thor supposes given their earlier confrontation it is too much to expect an apology of his own; his voice is heavy when he goes on, uncertain and unknowing of the response it will earn.

“Stay with me tonight.”

That does gain Loki’s attention; his expression has turned quite wry when he angles about to look to him. “You are in no fit state for bedsport, brother.”

He swallows hard, wonders why he feels so tongue-tied even when the words are so simple. “I merely want you near.”

“Mmm, that might be true in sentiment – but in practise you are always so _handsy_.”

Perhaps it is the threat inherent in the way Loki rises, eyes moving to the door, that has his temper rising again. “Then sit beside the bed, if you must.” His headache throbs again, and he scowls. “If you do not trust me to keep my word and not ravage you in the night.”

Both hands come to rest upon his thickening waist, face a perfect mien of disapproval. “You would have me, swelling with child, sleep the night in one of your chairs?” He angles towards the door again, voice scoffing. “I have a perfectly good bed of my own.”

With a groans Thor turns away himself; the elixir has a light soporific along with the analgesic, and he is quite ready for his bed now. Yet his sleep is uneven and uneasy, and when he awakens from the restless drowse still some hours before dawn he finds Loki in that sameself chair with knees spread indolently wide, deeply asleep.

For a long moment Thor does little but watch, resting upon his side, headache but a dull memory. Such sleep smooths away many of lines present when Loki is wakeful, though he clearly remains exhausted; his skin seems thin as paper, white with blue vein traceries while dark smudges beneath his eyes leave them hollow and haunted.

Thor cannot leave him like this, not while night still hangs gentle over Asgard’s aurora-ridden skies. A sigh escapes, inevitable as his rising action. He will object, he will sulk, but it is—

Thor’s eyes fall upon his discarded armour, bunched upon the floor. And then a small smile crosses his face in the same manner a solution has just crossed his mind.

When he wakes the next morning it is not by his own will; an awkwardly crooked finger pokes insistently at the level of one kidney, an equally long body pressed against him from shoulder to hip. When he rolls over he is met immediately with a pair of eyes whose blazing dominant emotion lurches between furious and exasperated with every heartbeat.

“I cannot rise unassisted.”

The words are remarkably mild, and Thor only just bites back on laughter even as the nudging hand comes alarmingly close to his unarmoured groin. “Well,” he says, light and easy, “I seem to recall I did once threaten to tie you down, should you make the tactical error of remaining in my bed.”

“I was not _in_ your bed,” Loki retorts, and then his eyes move down his cocooned body while lips twist in a grimace to match the twisting of words. “And I am not tied down.”

“Ah, but I thought this was more to your sensibilities.” Given Loki’s hands are permitted little proper movement within their bonds, Thor feels safe enough in reaching forward to brush a fond hand over disarrayed hair, smiling at the sight his brother presents. “Do you not agree? I bound you in my cloak so that you might be near me, but then it ensured I myself would be unable to give over to temptation in the night.”

When Loki’s head twists to one side Thor snatches his hand back before sharp teeth might close over any one of his vulnerable fingers. “You are a fool,” he mutters, and does not dignify Thor’s solution by struggling any further. Instead he remains upon his side, a fierce mistempered caterpillar with only his head left free. Though his eyes turn pleading, his scowl does somewhat ruin the effect. “So, you have made your point in your usual fool-handed way. Are you going to release me now?”

His own smile grows broader yet. “You just called your elder a fool,” he returns, and almost manages to sound apologetic. “I believe you might need a lesson in respect.”

“Oh, by the Norn’s half dozen _tits_ , Thor—”

Striking quick, Thor silences him with a kiss. But he knows better than to press what luck his natural charm brings him. Drawing back before Loki can even think to bite, he begins to work his hands over the crisscross pattern of the bundled cape. Loki makes no effort to free himself, watchful and wrathful but silent all the same as he lies like deer’s meat rolled in warm pastry.

When the bindings loosen he does not wriggle himself free. With great dignity of person and purpose he presses aside the cape, rises so that he is half-seated upon the edge of Thor’s great bed while his brother remains close still to its centre. Pale fingers collect up the rich crimson fabric, eyebrows drawn together as his head bows.

Thor realises a moment too late that in this Loki is as a hound taking the scent. The strike comes quick, the cloak wrapping about him like the arm of some great kraken rolling him inward. He falls upon the bed, limbs bound to trunk; when he thrashes, it is with all the dignity of a worm speared upon a fisherman’s hook. And Loki’s predatory smile promises that this will not be a victory so simply taken, that the act of snaring his prey is but the beginning of the true hunt.

The act of undressing is made slow and sensual, every twist of wrist and hip and spine made to exaggerate the easy sensuality of Loki’s very being. Thor admittedly is not built to appreciate such grace and delicacy of purpose; he much prefers just to rip clothing and armour away and take what is offered. But then Loki is not offering, and this is not precisely for his brother at all.

When Loki comes to lie beside him on the bed, the pale-skinned body is bare and brazen even as he half-curves about the growing swell of his abdomen. One hand drifts over it, protective; then it dips low to where his cock begins already to fill. Lazy now, his fingers seem alive with the scent of the sea. It is a different oil to what he so often uses, and Loki’s eyes are relentless upon him as that hand works himself while the other moving to his lips as if to capture the low moan that escapes.

One finger presses into his mouth, opening it just wide enough so that his tongue might snake out, wrapping about his finger. Then he grins, gasping as finger and thumb close tight over one nipple – but he teases still his fingers and his cock is flushed and hard in the circle of his hand. It is another hand skirting the snap of his hip, another _head_ rising from behind to ghost teeth over his throat. One of Loki’s doppelgangers has emerged from the æther itself, as bare as he though mostly hidden by the way Loki sprawls exposed before him. Thor struggles, but though it is his cloak it is not even a physical bond. Instead it is something sorcerous and strong, and far beyond even his rising will to break.

He must watch instead. Two hands now move in easy tandem over the hard cock, easing back the foreskin, tangling and twisting about one another. One dips lower, rolling his balls in knowing promise; Loki’s head arches back, the double leaning forward to nip and lick at his neck, where Thor’s hand would be could he but reach out. The double never looks at him. Its attention is focused upon Loki alone. But then Loki has eyes only for Thor even when a knee nudges between his, rocking him forward in rhythmic promise. A second later he looses a sharp gasp, eyes fluttering as the long fingers of an unseen hand twist and bury themselves in his welcoming body.

Then the leg is pressed forward; from this angle Thor cannot quite see such for himself, but Loki’s rolling eyes are all the proof he needs. The spasm rocks his body entire as he welcomes the intrusion – then he nudges over, hips canted up and thighs obscenely wide for the double between them. The length of that flushed great width thrusts in and out as Thor is forced to remain still and watchful, hands impotent and imprisoned even as his groin blazes with want and need and _love_.

Loki’s long fingers curve in the sheets, nails threatening to shred even such thick linen. Though Thor cannot see his face the sounds he makes are enough. With every jerk of his hips his own move in sympathetic motion, mirroring and stuttering over each thrust of the doppelganger who is immersed deep within the one whose face and form he wears with such careless grace. Loki himself closes his eyes, throat bared like a maid inviting the wolf’s feral kiss. When he comes the voice he speaks with is hard and keening and utterly without language, the double’s hand tight around his cock.

Then he speaks but one word, eyes open and wondering and filled with filthy sweet laughter. “ _Thor_.”

His own aching prick leaps, but there is nothing to be done to give himself such release. What small friction he can generate with his restricted movement is nothing by comparison to the after-tremors that still rock the tangled pair before him. Yet the double subsides, spent and breathing hard where he drapes over Loki’s own languid body. One hand rises, Loki’s eyes fixed upon Thor as he strokes the double’s hair, face buried still in his neck. Then he is gone in a sizzle of seiðr, leaving naught but the scent of starlight upon plasma-rich air. Thor growls, and at the low echoing rumble of thunder Loki stirs, turns. Beyond the window there is the flicker of roused lightning, and when he turns back his hair, sweat-sheened and curling slightly, mimics his lips’ lazy curve.

“Do you feel left out, perhaps?”

Thor swallows hard against a dry throat, aroused and ashamed and amused all in one precious extended moment. “Will it help at all, if I tell you that I am sorry for what I did?”

“Ah, but then _I_ am not.” Rising, long limbs stretching in the casual conceit of a stirring feline, Loki’s gaze shifts sideways. “In fact I feel rather in need a bath.”

Though he struggles, Loki pays him no whit of heed, merely moves to the bathchamber and closes the door behind him. When Thor eventually works free he believes it is more by Loki’s plan than his own strength. Such is proved the moment he walks into the bathchamber to find Loki lying in wait for him. Though he drives him down to his hands and his knees, Loki kisses what feels to be every inch of trembling sweat-riddled skin before taking him hard and fast against the floor, frenzied in their coupling before at last they must retreat to the bathwaters in a languid tangle of limbs and sated lust.

One hand moves over the slickened hair, and he cannot resist leaning forward, sucking at the skin where Loki’s pulse leaps to match; Thor has always loved the soft false-vulnerability of his brother’s long neck. “Will it always be this way between us, do you think?” he murmurs against the pulse; Loki’s answering laughter is like the loosed chaos of a summer storm brewed deep in that beloved throat.

“Would you have it any other way?”

“No.”

The silence rests as easy between them as Loki against him, hips bracketed by his brother’s opened thighs. Thor continues to work one hand over his hair, the other curved low under his belly, tangled with the fingers he finds there.

“So, brother,” he says, “what would you suggest we do now?”

“Are you really so dense?” And when he turns to look up to his brother, his smile is all terrible beauty of purpose. “Why, we’re going to Jötunheimr.”


	15. I Read, Much Of The Night, And Go South In The Winter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're pretty much on the downward slide from here on out; technically there's only one (!) more chapter to go, followed by an epilogue to tie up some of the loose ends. And I have both fairly much planned out, so I am actually kind of hoping to have this all finished by the weekend so I can concentrate on this little collection of ficlets I need to write by Christmas.
> 
> But, basically, if you have made it this far with me after all this time, I love you more dearly than you might ever know. I am always so unsure of my words and whether or not they have any worth, so the fact that you are still here helps me remember that my brain is not quite as useless as it tends to inform me it is. Thank you. <3

“I will not be part of this without some idea of what you plan to do.”

“I wish to open channels of communication with the Jötunn king.”

Loki speaks so easily while the very shape of such a statement leaves the bitter taste of ash in Thor’s mouth; it is the the flavour of the memory of Nerþuz’s funeral longboat, ablaze as it went over the edge of the world. “The creature who sired you,” he says, quiet, and Loki smiles.

“My father, yes.”

“He is not your father!”

Loki only shrugs, at ease in his current languid place. “That remains to be seen.”

“Odin Borrson is your father,” Thor returns, words as hot as his rising blood. “You are Loki Odinson—”

A raised hand stops him dead. “I have no need for your posturing, brother, believe me.”

But Loki says no more than that, his attention returned to the meadow and the play of noonday sunshine upon tree and stream and long grass. Sleipnir canters through the field of blooming silver and gold with a grace that ought to be impossible for the number of legs he was born with, unbridled and unsaddled and utterly content in the company of mother and uncle.

A moon’s turn has passed since their return from Vanaheimr, and Odin has not yet completed his pilgrimage to the Well. Neither Loki nor Frigga display any concern at such delay, though Thor has little understanding of the workings of the World Tree or the Well that feeds its deep roots. Therefore the lack of word from their father leaves him uncertain, uncomfortable though he does not worry overly about being a king even now. The truth of it has settled over him like a mantle woven at the time of his birthing gown. It simply feels too big yet. Such sensation is only worsened by the fact Loki is a restless breath of storm at his side, as if ever waiting to take to fresher skies.

But here, at least, Loki drops the glamour that conceals the near-five moon’s growth of his belly. The child moves within him with a regularity Thor sees as both alarming and amusing, though Loki seems only to find it expected. He seems to tire more quickly of his brother’s constant need to feel it for himself; indeed, even now Thor moves the loose tunic up to bare the swelling skin to the sky as Loki heaves a long-suffering breath and lies back upon the grass. Sleipnir whinnies across the way, but Thor has his ear pressed to navel as if he can hear the wordless voice within, as if he might feel the heart that beats below his brother’s.

“Even with what has been done, we cannot both leave Asgard.”

Startled, Thor looks up to where Loki has half-propped himself up, hair a dark tangle about his set features. His heart twists in a doubtful coil even though his words are flat and brook no contradiction. “Mistake me not, brother, I will come with you.”

Lazy yet, Loki shifts upon the sweet-scented ground like a serpent seeking the sun. “Ah, but you said that you will not indulge me.”

“Loki—”

“Father will return before this month’s end,” he interrupts, and now his amusement has quite fled. “Therefore it is time now to go to Jötunheimr, before he returns.”

Such pronouncement prickles across his flesh, the first passing ill wind of uncertainty. But then he has not become a warrior blooded and victorious by heeding all natural frailties of belief and knowing.

“Should we not wait until he does?”

“This is my final move. I will make it now.”

He sees little point in disguising his irritation at the phrasing; honesty might be malleable in Loki’s lightning grip, but in Thor’s it is thunderous granite. “This is not a game.”

“It’s always a game.” Flippant as the retort might be, Loki’s lips curve downward and long fingers bunch in the grass. The murderous grip crushes from the sticky long blades their scent as he levers himself upward, knees rising in protective formation before his abdomen. “But even when I lose it is only because I played to do so.” When Loki tilts his head, there’s a light mockery there not at all matched by the protective cradle of fingers and palms over his slumbering child. “There is always another game above the one you think you play.”

The distance between them, small though it is in reality, feels to be growing by the moment. Thor comes closer though Loki does not quite allow it; he stands, eyes moving to where Sleipnir canters towards the terminal edge of the high meadow, the place where green gives over to sky and the glittering city far below.

“What are you planning to do?” he asks, raw, and Loki’s shoulders move in slow shrug as if he is baffled as to how Thor cannot understand so simple a concept.

“Laufey must acknowledge me as his son – though not his heir, for all I do not think _that_ would ever come into question.” Thor comes to his side, an arm sliding about thickened waist; Loki leans his head upon one broad shoulder in the motion of a sigh. “I have two brothers—”

“You have _one_ brother!”

“—and their names are Helblindi and _Býleistr_ , yes?” When Thor answers with little more than a furious glare, underlain with the brontide of contained storm, Loki pokes him. Hard. Only when he twists the skin of one biceps in a pinch does Thor surrender a mutinous nod, and Loki nods with deep satisfaction before settling back against his brother’s bulk. “They are his heirs, and I wish not at all to supplant either or place myself into the succession.”

That is the moment when it explodes from him, all at once, screaming summer tempest unleashed even in a world of ice and winter. “ _Why_ must you be Jötunn?” Thor has Loki’s upper arms between his hands, holds him tight and yet all his attention is given only to the vague curiosity of Loki’s upturned gaze. “The Vanir marry brother to sister; for all she searches for Óðr, it’s apparent enough to anyone with eyes that Freyja finds husband enough in Freyr.”

“And the whispers of the little birds all over court are hardly in tune with their happiness.”

“We can do as we wish,” he argues, stubborn as the two goats that in many ways he has not ever truly mastered. “Loki, we can do this. _Together_.”

“Is that truly what you wish for your child? The shadow of sin as a birthing gift?” Stricken, Thor lets go; Loki raises one hand, cards it back through the disorder of his hair, shedding petal and grass both. “Or maybe you do not wish for my heritage to be discovered. For your child and heir to the be the bastard get of bastard get, a monstrous half-breed—”

Again Thor seizes Loki as if he seeks to seize his words too, forcing silence upon his silver-tongued brother. “Do not _ever_ speak of yourself that way,” his hisses, eyes ablaze. “I tolerate much from you, Loki, and for only one reason – because it’s you. Everything you are is _Loki_ , and whether you are Jötunn or Aesir or any of the other thousand forms you might take you are always Loki to me.”

In reply Loki does what is most infuriating, moreso than even his verbal jabs and parries. He merely stares. It fills Thor with the urge to shake him, to shout further as if the thunder of his voice might blow away the doubt that lies like ever-present cloud cover over his trust. His own fury is a deep thing. He has ever been too careful to keep it secret, to keep it hidden. Loki turns away from him now, shaking his head.

“There have been too many secrets already.” The words are strong as dwarven steel, eternal as star-forged uru. “I will not lie to this child.”

His mouth is numb, stumbles through his own reply. “I would not make you.”

“Then our child must know of the worlds whose blood built everything of the body and spirit we have wrought between us.”

Loki has turned back with furious temper in his eyes. Thor raises his chin, hand tight about imagined Mjölnir; she is far from his grip here, upon her pedestal in Glaðsheimr. “I will not let you go into Jötunheimr alone.”

“So you have said,” Loki replies, sour in a way that suggests to Thor he has somehow failed one of the many tests Loki so persists in setting him without warning. “But we cannot both go.”

“I will not argue this point with you, Loki.”

“No, you won’t.” His face brightens so suddenly it is as if a star has been born even as it fell from the heavens. “You will come as my servant Eldir.”

“I – _what_?”

“You are King of Asgard. Your very presence in Jötunheimr would be a prelude to war.”

Again, Thor does not bother to push down on the irritation that naturally arises with Loki’s condescension. “And _you_ are Prince of Asgard.”

“I am the shadow, the second son, the sly seiðmaðr. No-one believes I wield any power except that which I have stolen for my own self, which is mean enough in the face of that granted to the Allfather and his golden son.”

The vitriol rolls from Loki’s tongue with a delicate grace that turns Thor’s stomach, leaches his own anger quite away. “I hate it when you speak like this.”

“As the master of lies, it is I who should hate truth more,” Loki returns, far more cheerful that he ought to be even as his voice levels to a dark seriousness. “But surely even you can understand that after the great swathe the warrior-king cut through Vanaheimr in the name of his brother and his father, that you cannot escort me to Jötunheimr.” The twist of a smile he wears now strikes Thor as more a grimace of pain. “And you cannot be seen to escort _me_ , either. When I travel with you, you are the first. You are always the first.”

“To me, _you_ are first.”

“The Jötnar are not you. And neither is there anyone in the Nine Realms and beyond like Thor Odinson.”

If such words had been rendered instead as a touch, it would be a slap as much as a tender caress. Beneath such weight Thor shifts, his body uneasy with inaction. It should not be allowed, such manner of thought in his brother’s quick and clever mind; it births in his own body the mutinous wish to take Mjölnir and beat down thousands of years of society and rebuild it anew. Yet there is something in Loki’s eyes that holds him back, keeps the motion for another moment, another day: a spark that says he knows what passes through Thor’s mind. When the silent mouth quirks upward in an artless half-grin that reminds him of hazy days of childhood summer, Thor finds strength enough to speak.

“Whatever you believe is best.”

“Thank you.” Given Loki has never been one to worry overmuch for permission, Thor cannot help the surprise that spills through him even as Loki drifts forward. With hands upon his jaw he draws him forward, dipping him that brief difference in their height to press their foreheads together. “But there is first something I would have Thor do.”

His stomach rolls in lazy anticipation. “Which is?”

“I want Fenrir.”

It jars so strong with his reflexive imaginings that at first Thor cannot even understand that of which Loki speaks. “ _Fenrir_?”

The look this earns him hurts, and not just for the way Loki almost takes his response as inevitable. It is knowing that he so rarely thinks of Fenrir and his prison, even when so many of his actions in these days are made to prevent the same fate befalling his own child.

In the fashion of Jörmungandr, Fenrir had been long ago bound by the Allfather’s will. Jörmungandr’s place had been upon Midgard, where the natural lack of seiðr would slow his unnatural growth to almost nothing. Fenrir had required something different, chains constructed by the darkest and most eldritch of magics in the bowels of the dwarven earth; it is those which hold even now his brother’s child beneath the halls of Glaðsheimr. Access can be granted only from the great vault beneath the palace, and then only by the hand of the one who holds Gungnir.

Hel had been subject to a different fate indeed. A child neither living nor dead, in the end she had been bound by her own very nature. But then she had not been born entirely of Loki’s flesh as the others had been. In the distance Thor hears again the call of Sleipnir, kept in permanent servitude to his grandsire the true king now and always.

Thor’s hand rests upon Loki’s abdomen before he quite realises he even has stepped forward. “Our child will have his due.”

“Of course.” Irritable, almost, Loki places his own hand over Thor’s and squeezes in a manner more painful than kindly. “That is why we _do_ this.”

He does not want to ask, and yet he must. “Why do you want Fenrir?”

And Loki looks at him, pitying and unreadable beyond that. “He’s a much better conversationalist than you.”

Thor has not seen Loki’s lupine child in many years. He had scarcely known the creature at all, even in those earliest days when Loki had brought him as but a pup to the palace. Now deep shame roils in his gut, born of the fact he had not tried to understand what Loki had done. His beloved brother had created something of himself and the land that had given him life more than death. Yet all he had seen was his calm collected brother and the snarling beast that had grown from him, and agreed with the Allfather and the seers who condemned the overgrown creature to the darkness.

Given the change in all that has been wrought already by their weighted actions, Thor knows better now that this is something of Loki himself. If Sleipnir is the free spirit chained to the bridle, and Jörmungandr the strength wound about another’s throat like a weapon waiting for the hand of another, then Fenrir is the leashed rage. The three together are his own warriors three: the tamed, the bound, the enslaved primed weapon. All are elements of his own self, for all Loki makes his own prison in these days. Thor has not seen again the Jötunn form. It seems that it is something he keeps aside and only to himself, this creature that dances upon the fine edge of being feral and wild and free in a way that his Asgardian self might never hope to be.

_Is that why I fear what will happen in Jötunheimr? Vanaheimr was but another play, more mummery. Jötunheimr is where all masks might fall to reveal the truth beneath._

It is but the work of a second to remember the fury in Loki’s eyes when he had raged at him on Vanaheimr, when the lies had been wrapped tight as a mainspring about the strongest core of truth.

_And his eyes had been as hungry as the wolf who will never be sated because there is but one meal that will satisfy him_.

Even Thor is hesitant to approach the bound creature beneath Glaðsheimr. In this Loki is the fearless one, striding forward as if the darkness has never held anything he might not be able to appropriate as his own, as if there is nothing in him that fears approaching this part of himself. Disturbed, Thor feels a thick ripple of apprehension across his skin, clammy and cool in this yawning cavern in the floating bedrock of Asgard, but he says nothing.

There is in fact nothing at all to be said when Loki goes to his knees, hands moving deep into the thick fur of the chained beast. He gives a rumbled growl, a warning that tenses Thor’s hand and has it moving to Mjölnir at his belt, though it is Gungnir he holds in his grip now.

But Loki curves into his son, eyes closed as he presses his beardless cheek to the flat blade of one great shoulder. Fenrir moves closer, as if to draw his father through his skin, and is stymied only by the ominous clink of the chains that bind him. The thought of their release sends a frission of fear down even the straight-backed spine of the mighty storm-lord Thor Odinson, though the Allfather is far from this place and the Fimbulvetr has not yet begun.

_But you go to a land of ice and winter._

“Why do you stare at me so?” Loki asks, sudden in the space between them, and when Thor speaks he feels that the cold has settled deep enough in his bones to freeze him solid.

“I fear for you.”

In return Loki stares now at him, hands all but vanished in the thick grey fur of the wolf at his side, as bound to him as Fenrir is to the immoveable foundations of the realm eternal.

“In Vanaheimr,” Thor says with no grace, voice a broken reed that will permit no song. “The things…they did to you. I think of them, always. Of…of what you might think of them. Of what they mean.”

The look Loki graces him with then a look so bland as to be a mask; in the silence Thor cannot know how great a misjudgement he has made. Then he shakes his head, looks away. “It was no more than what I deserved.”

The wolf growls low in his great throat when Thor comes to his brother, lips drawn back over the gleaming white of his monstrous fangs. Thor cares not. All he can see here and now is the weight of the residual guilt Loki bears yet over what had been allowed to happen. Gungnir falls to the floor while Loki cradles his son to his chest even as his mind again forges the chains of his own punishment and wears them still in the fashion of his bound son.

Thor places his own arms about Loki, presses his face to his shoulder and breathes him in, the scent of seiðr and sorrow and the fleeting inevitability of contentment and peace. “No.”

“Thor.”

In letting go, Thor can only hold harder still. “I will not let anything of the sort happen to you in Jötunheimr,” he whispers, thickly-spoken oath pressed into the cool skin at the nape of his neck. “No matter what you say or do, no-one will lay hands upon you ever again.”

And Loki sighs, as if Thor might never understand a thing. “Please release my son.”

Gungnir responds to him, the hand of the king made solid, golden and shining as the soul he had been promised the moment he had been given over to the warmth and weave of Frigga’s womb. But it still does not quite feel as if it is his; a son playing at his father’s work.

_Will it always be this way?_

Such seiðr in his hands feels right only when Loki murmurs the words to bring down the wards: a pre-emptive echo that rings more true that his own anointed voice in the shimmering darkness of Fenrir’s prison.

Not a word is spoken afterwards, during their ascent or when they have emerged to the golden halls of the Allfather’s palace. In this late afternoon there is no-one to see them, though Thor does not doubt at all Heimdall’s knowledge of their work. Yet none seek to disturb the brothers and the wolf as they return to Thor’s chambers where Loki bids him strip to the skin. Thor does not quite know if this is necessary, given the workings before when they had gone to Vanaheimr wearing one another’s faces. But he cannot protest the soft light or the sure passage of hands over shoulder and waist and hip.

It does not quite feel worth it when it is done, when he passes his hands with their thickened knuckles and roughened skin through a great mop of rusty red hair. His squared and widened face sports a great bushy beard, shoulders broader even than usual and his entire form made over into a hulking thing. When he moves, all feels awkward, ill-fitted. There’s a strange something of Volstagg in this new form, perhaps, but then even the noble warrior still has a kind of grace to him. In this Thor is made a tame bull, dehorned and domesticated and yoked to the whim of a master he sometimes fears to scarce recognise.

Thor still stares at the foreign reflection when Loki returns from his own chambers, having collected what he wished. Fenrir sleeps yet upon the hearth, though even when closed Thor still feels the green weight of his wolf-eyes. Loki spares his son a stroke before striding to the mirror, feet echoing the low rumble of Fenrir’s pleasure.

“Oh, don’t look so hang dog, brother,” he says, and though he’s all practical detachment he spares a moment to pat Thor upon one fierce-bearded cheek. “You are still the handsome golden prince beneath all this hair.” Then Loki stops, as if taking in his handiwork properly for the first time; his eyes move downward, and when they slither upwards to meet Thor’s they hold a distinct mischief that settles close to his tamped desire. “Besides, even _I_ occasionally have the hankering for a bit of rough trade now and then.”

It goes no further than an inviting curve to his smile, and then Loki turns his attention to his own reflection. His chosen clothing remains unseen beneath the great cloak he wears; wrought of black bear fur, its collar is marked with golden chain and drops of emerald. In that it seems both refined and raw, nearly primitive in such a way as to be utter grace. Only his boots, thick leather laced with silvered thread and wrapped with seal fur, show below the great length of it. A cool glint to his eyes marks his temper as he extends a hand, nods to the door though Thor does not think it leads now to the same places it once did.

“Come then, Eldir, we have work to be about.”

 

*****

 

A strange sickness lingers in his first moments upon frozen Jötunheimr, brought about by travelling the darker paths Loki has kept as a secret for so many years. Yet different though it is indeed to the power of the Bifröst, it cannot be called strictly uncomfortable for all the disorientation. Nothing can be truly wrong with Loki at his side, rich seiðr shifting over Thor’s skin like the press of a thousand familiar fingers, coaxing him onward and upward and through.

Soon enough it passes, and their feet plough trails through a thick layer of snow fallen over frozen soil. When Thor struggles to maintain his footing Loki moves as though he was both born and raised to this place, though but one of those is true. Snowflakes settle on the dark uncovered hair, still worn longer than is his usual wont. In that it is as if the blue-taint air of the land is changing him already, warping his brother into something else entire. Pale skin shimmers like cursed ivory in the twilight, and Loki displays no discomfort upon his serene features while Thor feels already the chilling bite of absolute winter though even his thickened clothing and cloak.

Not far from the great fallen palace of the Jötunn king an accompaniment of guards materialises with a surprising silence given their height and bulk. They almost seem to detach from the ice; it makes Thor wonder what they are when they are not fierce warriors of snow and winter, if they nest always in the hollows where cold is as warmth to the Aesir mind, dreaming of the next war they will be roused to fight.

One hand twitches to his side, fox-gloved fingertips dancing upon the plain bone hilt of the false sword spelled over the truth of Mjölnir beneath. But Loki pays his hulking thrall no heed, eyes fixed and forward when he speaks with a voice made of fresh-frozen snow.

“I am here for my audience with the king.”

The apparent head of this party, a great-shouldered creature with thick ridges of bone giving him the appearance of a perpetual helmet, speaks with a voice like cracking frost. “Loki, Prince of Asgard?”

“Indeed.”

His brother is not generally a creature of so few words. But given the laconic attitude of the warriors he seems content to merely hold his head high and walk amongst them, silence borne like a proud mantle over fur-clad shoulders as they move ever deeper into the belly of this frozen beast Odin had thought to slay so very long ago.

The great hall resounds with emptiness; it is as if a great heart has been carved from its ribbed depths, leaving behind only silent hollow. At its end the king of glorious past and grievous present sits upon his throne, almost lazy in stance – but he remains predatory in the fashion of a snow bear that only half-slumbers, ever knowing of the prey that passes about its deep cave. The great body curves backward, feet planted firmly apart, heavy patterning plain upon both the coarse material about his hips and across the vast expanse of skin it reveals.

Thor stares even though as a mere vassal he has no right. But he cannot look down, cannot look away. At least he has sense enough to ensure there is yet no challenge in his gaze, but even had he been fool enough to allow that he could not have dropped his eyes. Thor has known very little of Loki’s Jötunn form, but memory has engraved itself deep upon his mind.

He sees now that similar patterns move about the muscled body of the frost giant before him. And it strikes him hard, then – this is Laufey, King of Jötunheimr, and these are the markings of his bloodline and kin.

And Loki is his son.

“I demanded private audience with the king.”

“So you did,” he rumbles, acknowledgement of Loki’s easy arrogance quirking at one corner of his dark lips. “But, pray tell me, if we are to trust each other behind closed doors then why felt you the need to bring such an awesome beast at your heels?”

“For all his dull appearance, admittedly, I can assure you that Eldir is quite the conversationalist.” His gloved hand seems cool even through the thick leathers and furs when he places it upon Thor’s arm, the caress of a hound’s keeper. “And I do so like to have my travelling companions, Laufey-king.”

Something amused in those crimson eyes flares brighter still when they nod to his other side. “I speak of your lupine familiar. There are tales, it is said, of how the get of Loki will bring down sorrow upon the House of Odin when comes the twilight named Ragnarök, falling hard to end the long golden days of the Ás.”

“Fenrir has his place,” Loki says, and his hand drops from Thor’s arm to skate easy over his son’s shaggy head. “And I would have mine. As to this, I would speak with you in private, between king and the son of the same.” The glint in his eyes serves as a warning to all who know Loki well, though it is clear enough that even a stranger ought take heed. “Though if you wish it, your two sons might remain.” Now he speaks with careless indifference, a hand waved. “You might keep mine, as assurance of my good behaviour.”

“But surely you would not mourn his loss, if he is to be the end of the Allfather your sire,” Laufey observes, great chin cupped in one surprisingly dextrous hand. “And surely it would only be to our own advantage, to keep him if he is but the only one granted the power to end his long life.”

“I have something greater to offer.”

The bald statement renders the king watchful. In turn that sends a shudder through Thor as he recognises something watchful and wary and wonderfully _curious_ in Laufey’s expression – something he has known of his brother ten thousand times and more, when his quick mind has become intrigued by something. Horror churns low in his spelled gut – if he is not ready for this, then how possibly could Loki be?

Expectation lingers upon the air, ripe as Iðunn’s blessed apples, while the hall clears. Loki displays no concern when Fenrir is led away, though Thor’s hand is tight upon his sword; in the end it is but Loki and his apparent thrall, and the king and his two sons.

“Tell me this thing you offer us,” the king says, and Loki smiles.

“I shall show you.”

The scent of magic flares like sudden fire upon the air. Hands, now ungloved, move in graceful pattern and form – and Thor feels the world tilt even as the sons shout a warning that becomes wonder with but a second’s difference. And Laufey’s eyes widen as he leans forward, a great cat roused to a hunger which will not be denied for all the feast suddenly laid before him.

All eyes are upon the Casket of Ancient Winters held steady and easy in Loki’s hands. At first not a soul seems to realise that Loki’s skin has changed with it, the glow moving beneath skin and through vein to leave a trailing shimmering transformation. With but another simple movement the Casket is gone, the disappeared roiling glow seeming to cast the throne chamber back into frozen darkness. But they can see yet Loki’s face, the smile upon it bold and terrible in the beauty of the crown of markings upon his brow.

Laufey’s spine straightens, the great giant rising in his chair. “You are the bastard child I left to die.”

“And lo, I did not.” Loki’s shoulders are light beneath even the heavy furs of his bearskin and jewels. “You fail in infanticide as you did in fatherhood, for all you cared not even enough to try your hand at the latter for much longer than a fair few days of my earliest existence.”

Thor’s hand remains tight about the hilt of his sword and he can feel the eyes of Helblindi and Byleistr both upon him. Yet Laufey finds Loki’s incautious derision amusing, judging by the easy mockery he returns. “You were a runt and an error of judgement that was easily enough rectified.”

“And yet here I stand.” His smile is both sweet, and very very bitter. “With the Casket at my very call, no less.” Then he tilts his head, the leading tone in his voice unmistakable. “It responds to royal blood, does it not?”

“It does.”

“And so here I am, as you name me: the bastard child of the Jötunn king, abandoned and left to die.” If Loki seeks to tell his father of how this has hurt him, Thor sees it not; Loki is nothing but scorn when he adds: “Then given new life and purpose by the king of the Aesir.”

“You truly believe this is why he chose to take you?”

Of all the Nine Realms, only Midgard holds to ignorance of prophecy and fate. Yet Thor cannot believe Laufey would allow his son to die, had he understood the potential gifted to his chaotic soul.

_Unless he_ knew _that the Allfather would never leave a child—_

“I know what the Norns would make of me – which role all the worlds here and beyond would have me play.” And he smiles again. “Yet I make my own fate.”

The cloak is thrown back with no further word, punctuated only by Thor’s sharp indrawn breath. Beneath the heavy furs, Loki stands all but naked – naught but the loincloth of the Jötnar about slim waist and narrow hips. But his once-flat belly is rounded, undeniably swelling with child. And the matching curving markings are the mirror of his blood-sire’s, fierce condemnation of anyone who might dare deny the truth.

“You carry another child.”

Loki’s hands move over the stellate patterning about his navel. “And I would not have my child ignorant of heritage and lineage in the same way I was.”

The king gives a laugh that echoes through the chamber like a stuttered heartbeat. “ _You_ wish to be known as a Laufeyson?” he asks, disbelief painted across broad flat features. “You, the discarded runt kept as second son to Odin Allfather?”

“I do.”

Loki’s daring is known across the realms; few would dare speak so plainly as he, when the urge has struck him. Yet even Thor wishes now to leap forward, to clamp his hand over his brother’s mouth and hold his jaw closed until the wilful tongue within ceases all speech. But he is a thrall before his prince and a king, and he promised to trust the former because he too is the latter.

_You always did know best how to play me, brother mine._

“This is no simple thing you ask of us,” the king says, and Loki’s fingers move in easy pattern for all the Casket remains hidden in those strange shapeless places just beyond the edge of reality.

“It is no simple thing I bear in return.”

He wants to shout. He wants to stride forward and shake his brother, throw him to the floor. _Are you a fool?_ he shouts, railing in his mind even as his borrowed form is stiff and solid and silent. _Do you not realise what they will do when they have the Casket returned?_

“Why would you wish to do this?” Laufey’s eyes are a flint waiting to spark coldfire. “Who fathered this bastard of yours, that you are so determined to give him a true name that will leave him loathed, rather than the false name that you have worn so happily all these long years?”

“Names have power,” Loki says, and bows low. “I will give you time to ruminate upon these matters, in council or simply in the king’s mind alone. Allow us to spend our night here, my servant and son and I, and we shall speak again in the morning.” When he looks up, the crimson eyes are the heartfire of a cursed ruby drowned in innocent blood. “I realise my return from beyond the grave must have been quite the surprise.”

“Quite.” The dry reply leaves Thor uncomfortable. He then realises he cannot tell if that is true, either from Loki’s sly smile and Laufey’s mask of kingly amusement.

_Like father, like son_.

“Why do we not just do this now?” Laufey asks, as if he has not indeed the power to simply order it so. Loki gives a fey shrug, light upon his booted feet.

“Because this is the time when all things might change.” He leans close, and despite the distance still between them the words are as a conspiratorial whisper between the two alone. “But there is time enough yet to think upon what changes we might most wish to bring about.”

Laufey’s smile is as terrible as that upon the mouths of men who had fallen prey to the gentle grasping lies of winter, and smiled when the cold stole them away. “Then we would resume upon the morrow, Loki son of two realms, and king of neither.”

 

*****

 

Well-suited chambers are given over to the visiting Aesir with a grace that surprises him; though it is apparent Loki need not fear the climate or ambient temperature, his servant is cannot claim the same. They therefore find themselves in a dignitary’s chambers, its alien appointments making it clear it has been made for those of another realm.

They have been brought here after a brief and peculiar meal with the king and his closest kith and kin. Even now Thor tries hard not to number Loki amongst them though he wears his Jötunn skin with languid ease, and had done so even as Thor struggled through the half-frozen fare that serves as food. Lacking the bony protrusions that pass for teeth and their impervious nature in the cold, the so-called cuisine of the Jötnar offers him little sustenance. Even without such handicap Loki ate little himself for all he had been always under the watchful eye of the king. Both careful and careless in the same motion, Loki’s silver tongue had danced, light and laughing over song and jest. Thor had found it maddening to sit so close to such dense liquid life, ever unable to reach out and touch.

But then he recalls too well the gleam of the Casket in his hands, the twisted betrayal that had dug deep claws into his heart. Gone though it might be now, the truth still holds: Loki has brought the single greatest desire of the Jötnar to the feet of their king. As the King of the Aesir Thor’s anger is a heated thing, burning in his breast even as the thrall Eldir holds his tongue and obediently bows his head. In an odd way it feels almost a lesson; perhaps this is but how Loki has so often felt.

It cannot last long. They are in their chambers and alone for but a moment when Loki turns his back. Thor is upon him then, thick arms about his middle, furious and desiring all at once.

“Do be careful,” Loki says, fearless in face of such fury. “I can and will burn you in this form.”

“You liar.”

The laughter is like the white breath of warm air upon frozen air. “Shall I prove it?” he asks with idle glee, and Thor spins him around so that he mind hold him still, though it feels yet that Loki is a whirling dervish of snow and ocean ice in his trembling palms.

“Not that. Everything else.” He cannot help but shake him, half a head taller than even the Jötunn Loki in this borrowed farce of a face. “I thought you brought me to be your _partner_ , not your fool.”

“You are always my fool,” Loki replies, utterly polite, and Thor’s fingers begin to leave bruises the colour of dark ripe plums upon his golden-whirled skin.

“What are you doing?” he demands, and Loki cocks his head like the curious child he once had been, so very long ago.

“Are you angry?”

“I am furious!” His voice, that harsh thing lower and more coarse than his own, is like raw violence to shudder against these alien walls. “Loki, the Casket is not some simple tool to barter away.”

The crimson eyes turn as cold as his skin. “And our child’s place is a simple thing?”

“I did not say that!”

“You implied it.”

“That talent is yours, not mine.”

Even as Loki snorts, his eyes flick sideways. Thor realises a moment later he holds Eldir’s sword like a warhammer. Even when Loki rolls his eyes, he does not lower it, not even when a careless flick of a hand shudders through his form like misspelled lightning called down from the heavens above Yggdrasil’s highest branches.

“You look less of a fool now.” And then he snorts, again. “But only _less_ , mind.”

Mjölnir in his hand is familiar and welcome, yet here is she is raised against a Jötunn prince. Here she is raised against his _brother_. Lower it though he might, that shame still does not beat down the pulse of anger. “Loki, this is madness.”

“I have no intention of simply giving them the Casket, Thor, do not be too much of an idiot.”

“Why do you not trust me?” Though Mjölnir is no longer raised, she hangs from his hand with a steady pulse like a second heartbeat, erratic and quick to match the charged stormcloud tangle of his thoughts. “Even now, with all we have been through, still you will use me as a tool?”

“And what do you think I am?”

“How many times must I prove myself to you, Loki?” His Jötunn form is a mask Thor cannot strip away, and his next frustrated question is a demand. “How did you take the Casket?”

“I did not lie before Laufey-king. It responds to royal blood.” In his hands, it had wrought something new of Loki entire. Thor has seen it before, has even been close enough to touch. But he never has. He has never wanted to.

Until this moment.

“Give it to me.”

“No.”

“This is not a game.”

“How good of you to notice!”

Taunts and tricks had been Loki’s currency of choice long before he learned to count their cost – and for all his natural temper, Thor has had lifetime enough to save some resistance to both. His voice is flat when he says: “We must return to Asgard.”

“If you wish to return to Asgard, I can do that. It’s but a moment’s thought for one such as I to conjure enough dark matter to shove you back where you belong.”

Thor shoves Loki in return. “You belong there as much as I.”

“Do I?” When he opens his arms wide a shudder rocks Thor to his very centre, as much shock as desire. The loincloth ostensibly preserves Loki’s modesty, and yet the slim low fit of the jewelled belt and the two panels reveal leg from bare ankle to the height of jutting hip. The patterns are shadowed by gold paint that makes them shimmer as if cast in true gold; piercings adorn nipples his nipples, the gold there shining as bright as the barbaric runes draped about his neck and the bracelets upon narrow wrists. Serpentine coils of the same rest about lean muscle of thigh and upper arm, and in this he is absolute alien beauty.

“I am Jötunn, Thor.” It is both scorn and weariness now. “Perhaps it is simply in my nature to return to my people.”

“These are _not_ your people.”

One dark eyebrow rises high. “So you think they will no more accept me than the Aesir, when told of my true lineage?”

“They will accept you!” Mjölnir is a heavy weight in his hand, one unsuited to such battles; he lets he go, her thump reverberating through what feels the frozen bedrock upon which the palace sits. Thor cares not for what the king might make of such; he has eyes for Loki alone when he storms forward, hand upon his neck fierce so that Loki too might look nowhere else but to his brother.

“I am King, present and past and future,” he swears. “And you will be king at my side.”

He shakes his head, almost pitying. “But only if you allow me my plotting this moment, here and now.”

“It is the _Casket_ , Loki!” he snaps back, frustration rising to beat against his mind, itching to be loosed through motion and movement. “How many died to take it from this place, and you simply walk into the lion’s den bearing it like a child who wishes to curry a father’s favour?”

The blink of those crimson eyes is slow. “But then he is my father, is he not?”

“He left you to die!”

“Did he?” And Loki’s face takes on a near sinister cast when he pulls back from Thor’s grip, the lines alien and strange in the dim light. “Did he _really_?”

Thor has never been able to catch Loki’s lies quick nor true. “I love you more than he ever could,” he says, almost dumbly, and Loki snorts.

“There are many different kinds of love in these worlds, Thor.” He reaches forward, presses his fingers to his cheek; the cool of his fingers is like the trail of a thousand tears never shed. “But then it has always been your gift to see them all as the same, one no less or no better than the other.”

“I love you,” he says, hoarse and wanting. Loki smiles, sad and low.

“I know it.”

“Give me the Casket.”

When they’d been children, Loki had been both the only one who’d known how to calm the berserker born to his blood, and how best to rouse him to killing power. “No.”

Thor thinks not of all of consequence when he throws Loki down to the floor. A gasp very much like a tangled laugh manages to escape his throat before Thor leans over him, chests crushed too close together for Loki to breathe, let alone move.

“ _Give it to me_.”

He arches his back, just enough; the contact of the chill skin of his belly shivers through him, a bladed promise of blood and fire even as Thor remembers the child between them. “Shall you make me, then?” he asks, expression ingenuous and lacking guile even as one hand curls between them, palming his own cock. Thor slaps it away with a snarl.

“Only if you make me.”

“In many ways, brother mine,” Loki says with a brilliant smile, “we do in fact make each other.”

This time it is a roar when he lets him go, turning away lest his temper get the better of him again. His fury courses through him, raises his fist; it drives hard against the wall, birthing a stellate spark of fury forced through the ice.

“It’s like you wish to be punished,” he says, ragged and harsh. “Is _that_ it, Loki? Is _this_ the punishment you want from me?”

He is given no answer, save for the light pad of feet across the fur-strewn floor. Again he closes his eyes, full weight come to bear upon the ice that holds fast. Not even the Allfather, not even the removal of the Casket had been able to bring this palace down. It stands, broken and hollow, but still it remains.

“Look at me.”

Thor fears little, but that voice fills him with unspoken terror when he turns to find a coiled form upon the furs of the great bed. The skin like dusk is alight with golden aurorae, twisting about muscle and limb until all converges upon the crimson gleam of his eyes. Loki his brother, this is not. And yet he is always Loki. To look upon him so is to invite chaos itself into his mind, a dizzying sensation overtaking mind and body as if he stands upon the blurred edge where two realities overlap. In his ears are his father’s words, speaking of the prophecy whispered to him by the very Casket Loki conceals about his person, ringing through his mind in the cold song of iron bells.

Perhaps this is how it might have been, had Loki never been taken from this place. This might have been the way they had been destined to meet: the golden son of Asgard and the silvertongue of Jötunheimr, come together in a world of ice that they might set alight with the terrible promise of their union.

Striding forward, Thor closes a hand about one wrist, bracelets pushed up over the delicate burr of bone. When he pulls Loki up he makes no protest, not even when he turns him violently around so that he might then be shoved forward. Hands brace upon the table before them both, throat choked with laughter, but Thor’s attention is on the material of his loincloth. One hand, scarcely trembling now, presses against the fabric; the closer he comes, the more obvious it is that Loki wears nothing beneath it.

“The thought that I could just press this aside and _have_ you…”

“We were in diplomatic negotiation, and this is all you could think of?” The chortle all but rends the air, startling in its pitch. “No wonder Father always thought to have me by your side!”

Thor pays this no heed. The curve of his buttock holds hid attention in a manner far more urgent, and scarcely without thought Thor palms his brother’s head and pushes his face down hard against the ice-varnish of the wood. Despite the startled snicker Thor cares not for what Loki wishes in this moment. Instead he runs both hands over the swell of his behind, the curving raised patterns Loki has not yet permitted him to know as well as he should like.

Then one hand dips lower yet, moving between the slight spread of his legs. A heaviness there is easily found, and Thor cradles the strange warmth of his balls, pressing them into the space between his fingers. Rolling them until a soft squeeze brings a startled groan, Thor must smile, grim and knowing; only then does he add the press of a blunt thumb against his entrance.

“Is this some deep dark fantasy of yours, now realised?” Loki whispers, sudden and breathless. “The Jötunn monster under your thrall?”

It is a sort of punishment, perhaps, to let his hand fall away then. But then both move to his belt. It slides smooth through his hands, warmed worked leather stubbed with metal and worked with runes that he uses to bind Loki’s wrists, stretching them high above his head. He speaks not at all to call Mjölnir to hand; he simply extends his will and she answers, almost humming her low satisfaction as he placing her head down upon the bed, the shaft immobile pressure against the space of leather between bound wrists.

“Ooh,” Loki murmurs with a delicious shiver that rocks him from hip to shoulder like a twisting serpent, “how _do_ you like your spoils then, Odinson?”

Thor is as stone before the bound Jötunn beneath him. “How did you take the Casket?”

“Oh, that was easy.” Loki always has loved the storm; even as children he’d been the one to run out into the thundering night, a stuttering stop-motion image wrought in flash and burn. “ _Think_ , brother – I had you release Fenrir, yes?”

He brings his eyebrows together, deep drawn confusion. “I lifted only the wards on his bindings.”

“But who told you how to lift those bindings?”

Thor closes his eyes, but the darkness cannot relieve the growing throb behind them. “I lifted them all, didn’t I.”

Loki’s voice is the pitying caress upon his cheek that his bound hands cannot be. “You always were a bit of a fool, Odinson.”

Drawing back, Thor opens his eyes to see that which he has laid out before him. With some of his fury cleared, he feels sharp relief to see that at least Loki’s abdomen is raised and clear of the table beneath. Yet Loki remains all coiled mischief even with Mjölnir’s weight upon the leathers holding him down; when Thor turns him over the alien skin shimmers blue and gold in this alternate reality that spins about them like an unravelling skein, one not meant any longer for the weave of their fate. Thor leans closer, traces a finger down over the curve of belly, and then presses aside the front flap of the heavy patterned fabric. Beneath, the thick cock juts upward, almost purpled with the pressure of roused desire, head pearled with iridescent white. “For you, perhaps?” he says, and Loki gives a sharp laugh.

“Perhaps?” Ducking his head, he looks up from beneath his dark brows and smirks wider yet. “Try _always_.”

There truly is no way to know if this is how it might have been between them. These are the lives they have been given, this is the lay of the love between them. But Thor bothers not to think of what is and what might be as he rips away the meagre clothing entire, hands rough as they move up over side, brushing over pebbled nipple pierced through with gold and crowned with ruby in zoisite.

“Did you really do this to yourself, or is this a glamour?”

“Beneath even the most complex of lies there is always a truth yet.” And Loki will say no more, even when Thor growls and dips his head, catching the jewellery between his teeth so he might tug until hips drive up against him, the press of their child, feet scrambling for purchase on the rich furs of the floor.

There are many ways he might take him here: a conquering king taking his spoils, a prince come to court his immortal betrothed, a father note yet made giving tribute to the mother of his babe unborn. Thor cares for none of it, stripping himself bare in this place of frost and winter, lowering his head to the cock before him and taking him down.

There’s a slightly different scent to him, in this form: both in skin, and in the coarse hair about his groin. It matters not. Every whimper, every whisper is as Loki, and it is the soul he loves, the spirit he cleaves always to as Loki murmurs prayers and perversions alike in more languages than Thor can count, in more tongues than Thor thought ever to exist.

His hands are still bound when Thor at last slips into him, finds him warm and welcoming, arching up to accept him. He _is_ a fool, and always has been. But he cannot deny his delight in this, in knowing that Loki is his even when Loki is scarcely even his own.

Later, after they have bathed themselves and one another clean in the adjacent chamber – though it had taken three attempts to do so, and all because Thor could not help tracing the lines of his Jötunn lineage, never quite knowing if he were trying to erase them or just engrave them ever deeper into his own memory – they return to the bed. It is warm and Loki makes no intimation towards clothing himself. Rather he seems almost too comfortable in his Jötunn skin, lounging upon the bed with his belly on proud display and his skin now almost silvered in the strange snow-light of fallen evening.

Thor does not dress either, and despite the weight of Mjölnir but a mind’s summons away he feels uncomfortable as he sits beside Loki upon the edge of the furred bed. “Is it really wise or safe, for us to sleep beneath his roof?”

“Of course,” Loki says, quite dangerous in a blithe fashion that skirts the edge of petulant. “Even granted the fact I hold the Casket, he realises it is not about my person in any fashion that would render it easily stolen.” Propping himself up upon one elbow, Loki reaches forward to twist sweat-dampened hair about two fingers before tugging just hard enough to hurt. “And besides _that_ , we have eaten at his table, have been received as dignitaries. Tradition states that following such formalities, one might not slaughter an honoured guest like a pig in his bed.”

“These are Jötnar,” Thor replies, allowing himself to be drawn down by his hair; Loki releases it, and then the trace of Loki’s fingers now over pale Aesir skin is all threat of frostbite and burn.

“And what am I?”

“You are – you were not—”

Even as Thor struggles to decipher what offense he might have given, Loki waves a hand and banishes it as though he will not remember it long after this moment. “They are not without their barbarian customs – but then, neither are we.” Fingernails trail in dark warning over the low rise of hip, but then they draw back and Loki himself lays his head upon their shared pillow. “Sleep, brother. There is no need to guard me through the night.”

Thor remains upright, and despite the unnatural warmth of the ice gooseflesh prickles across the exposed skin of chest and arm and back. “I would all the same.”

The fingers close over his wrist as tight as any fetter. “But you already _do_ ,” he says, the flash of irritation in his eyes warring with sudden delight. “No-one would dare harm Loki son of Odin, not knowing that Thor son of Odin awaits his return in Asgard.”

Thor frowns over at him, and then Loki laughs aloud.

“And after what became of Vanaheimr, not even Laufey-king himself would be foolish enough to think to take his brother from him – for who _would_ dare risk the wrath of the king-apparent of Asgard after having seen the spoils of that particular conflict?” The curved grin is pure likeness of a shark’s mouth, one filled with razor teeth that only grow back no matter how many times they are broken. “See it as I do, brother: Thor has proved himself his father’s son, and who else more than Laufey knows the wrath of Odin Allfather?”

Thor closes his eyes, a great weariness upon him even as he must laugh. “Very clever.”

“I thought so.” But even with Loki’s hands encouraging him down, keeping him close, Thor cannot forget the chill of them when the Casket had been held between his Jötunn palms.

“Fear not, brother mine,” he whispers. “For while we play in my shadows now, it is all for the child I would have live in light eternal.”

“And you, as well.” His fingers tangle in the curling hair. “I never meant to hurt you. I never want to hurt you ever again.”

There is no reply to that, and yet Loki rests as easily here as he might in his favoured place beneath one of Iðunn’s greatest apple-trees. Sleep does not come so easy for Thor. He stares instead at the carved ceilings with their great ice-chandeliers, hanging daggers above the heads of all those who dare move below. Then he curves about his brother and holds him tight. No matter what game Loki plays with his usual delicacy of deception, Thor does not think he will sleep while the pieces are yet in motion.

 

*****

 

In this grim excuse for morning that is all Jötunheimr has left to offer, Loki strides the halls in Aesir form. But he bears his pregnancy with open pleasure, and it is all Thor can do not to reach forward to wrap him in his arms, to shield both abdomen and mother against the cold curiosity of this world and those who dwell within it.

There is some part of him that wishes more to shield Loki from even himself.

Fenrir pads with easy menace at his side, the two moving in an easy synchronicity whose time is kept by the tap of Gríðarvölr in hand. Thor feels out of tune even as he does not miss a beat of the blade-tipped staff, rendered now as little more than an oversized shadow trailing his brother’s wake.

“Father said you broke that.”

“ _Odin_ said I broke it,” he corrects without breaking stride. “And that I did.”

After it becomes obvious Loki regards the exchange as over, Thor scowls; it suits the rough planes of his borrowed face far more than his true one. “You remade it.”

“This is what chaos is. The eternal play of the break and the build.”

“I am not chaos,” he replies, scowling deeper at the way Loki twists the words of the Allfather. Loki gives him an amused look, as if he wonders how Thor could ever believe things could be otherwise.

“But then, too, you preserve,” he observes, adding a wry flash of a smile. “But do stop speaking as if you are who you are not, Eldir. We have a busy morning before we might return to Asgard and my brother.”

There are more Jötnar in the hall for this second audience. Accustomed as Thor is to the pomp and ceremony of kingship, to the eyes of worlds upon his every movement, uncertainty dogs every step he takes in the wake of his brother as Loki moves forward. In contrast he is proud and unashamed in the cut lines of his heavy coat, feet light as a dancer’s upon the icy floor. Thor feels a lumbering half-giant, too big in his skin but so _small_ in comparison to the behemoths of ice-wrought flesh all about them.

When Loki stands before the king he makes no obsequious bow, gives but scarce acknowledgement of their differences in station and social position. In every respect, from the tilt of his head to the knowing glint in his eye, Loki has become the prodigal son returned to his amused father. For all the bitter gall that rises at such realisation, Thor too cannot tamp down a coil of fear that he does know how long such amusement will hold on part of the Jötunn king.

His hand brushes over the glamoured haft of Mjölnir, and in that he knows the cure for all fear he would defeat.

Such movement goes unnoticed by almost all in the chill hall; Laufey’s own gaze is reserved for Loki alone, and in that crimson roil Thor cannot hope to read anything of intention. He instead keeps his eye upon the placement of foot and arm, the distribution of weight, the ripple of muscle as the Jötunn King moves languid in his chair to regard this unexpected petitioner before his throne.

“And so you come to make your offer, Loki of Asgard?”

“I do.” Again Loki’s hands move in the unspoken runes of movement and magic, the Casket summoned once more to his ungloved hands. Startled whisper rushes through the court like a chilling wind, picking up frenetic pace even as Loki’s skin turns to blue and raised marking, leaving a Jötunn runtling costumed in Aesir court clothes in the place where Loki Odinson had stood but moments before.

And one marked hand moves over his swelling child, his smile chill as the screaming winter death.

“For the good of the child I bear, for the future I wish for said child, I wish to be known first and foremost as Loki of Jötunheimr, bastard son to the king and never his heir nor property.”

One hairless browridge cants high with fascination. “You wish only the patrynomic of Laufeyson.”

“I do.”

“And for the non-interference of Jötunheimr and her throne in the lives of you and whatever children you will bear their nameless sire.”

“Yes.”

Again the king lounges back in his chair, taking in with idle thought the peculiar son the fates have blown back to his door. “And what is there in this for us?” The sly cunning of a king brought low but not entirely humbled glints bright in those eyes. “For I do believe it might be…advantageous to take back that which the Allfather stole, and the as-yet unripe fruit of whatever seed it is that he carries in his belly.”

Thor cannot imagine Loki ever being forced where he does not wish to be; he himself would rain down war upon all the Nine to give him what choice he has earned. Such battles have already ranged from one to three other realms. In the form of a manservant he can say nothing though the false sword is ever the comforting weight of Mjölnir in his palm, muscles rigid and primed. But Loki’s gloved hand is soft upon forearm, eyes upon the king as he smiles in the fashion he does just before flyting a banquet into utter anarchy and chaos.

“You will not expect my aid. You will not call me to arms in the name of this realm.  You will do nothing to become a father now where you never were in the past. All I wish is your name, your acknowledgment, and your acceptance that you have lost that which you made no attempt to keep. In return,” and his eyes flash green as the mirth of a trickster born and bred, “I shall gift you the Casket of Ancient Winters.”


	16. Then Spoke The Thunder

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we are: the ending. As promised. ...I swear, I only wished for them to be happy.

Again Laufey shifts upon his throne, a creature of ice who bleeds warm all the same. “I should not think it is yours to give,” he observes, and Loki’s shrug shifts the markings upon his own Jötunn skin like golden threads he had spun himself.

“For all the Allfather could bear it away, there is nought else even he, with all his seiðr and strength, can do with it.” It comes to him again, then, summoned to his hand but what seems little more than a thought. Above its white-blue glow, Loki’s face is a rictus of sly shadow. “It responds to royal blood, and rarely any other.”

“So you have said,” Laufey replies with the insouciance of one who has long known such truth for himself, and Loki’s smile cuts deeper yet.

“And so should you listen. I will not give you the Casket with not a string attached.”

“And I would expect no less of the Liesmith of Asgard.”

Loki’s smile still holds nothing gentle in its crystalline line, but there is a prickly kind of pity. “Revenge burns in your heart,” he says with easy indulgence, “but I would not allow it. You might have the Casket, but I would bind its use.”

“Then what use is it to me?”

“It is the beating heart of this world that the Allfather ripped from her corpse, and kept frozen for a millennium in his vault of weapons and war.” His hands move wide, as if in a gesture of great and guileless generosity. “I would give it back, yes. No land is whole without such a treasure. But then I would first remind you of the purpose of a heart.”

For a moment Laufey allows Loki his dramatics, and then he gives but one word in return, simple and languid as his great Jötunn body. “Life?”

“And love.” Stepping forward, sinuous and simple as a snake considering a strike, Loki comes right to the foot of the king and looks up with no sign of fear nor reverence. “I would bind it to my child.”

Laufey’s crimson eyes go very wide. “What?”

Loki drinks deep of such reaction; it has always been his way, has always been his reason for such games. It is not so much the result, but the chaos of its creation that he thrives upon. “Should you harm my child, then the Casket would lock itself against you. Sole control of its power would revert to my child – or should my child should no longer be living, to me.” And now his voice descends to darkness. “If neither of us live, then it will collapse upon itself, and Jötunheimr would again fall to ruin.” And when he smiles now, it is as cold and controlled as the longest winter night that can claim no dawn. “It shall be a permanent ruin, this time.”

“You would lay such a curse upon our house?”

“Something like that.” Loki steps backwards now, hands still about the Casket, as knowing and sure as they had been about his own belly. “And I know you are patient about your plots and your revenge. But then, consider this, Laufey-king – Fenrir is the prophesised end of the Allfather. Surely you would not wish to end his life simply for the fact that by doing do, you might allow Odin Borrson a longer life than even the Norns have deemed him worthy of.”

In Laufey’s crooked half-smile Thor recognises Loki’s own habitual amusement at a game well played. “You are my son, indeed.”

“Oh, yes.”

The smile melts away, the king’s face a glacial carving wrought in blue line and crimson centre. “Our lives are long,” he observes, and it is the cool touch of winter upon the summer-child skin of the golden prince of Asgard. Again, Loki is unmoved.

“They are,” he accepts, and though he smiles not Thor knows him well enough to hear the ravenous anticipation in his voice. “I’m sure we shall play this game again.” And he takes two more steps back, nods down at the Casket. “But for now, we both have won. If you will only accept my move.”

“I do.”

The smile is slow and relentless, like the passage of a glacier through mountains that had never thought to be so carved and hollowed. Thor himself feels blindsided, wishes for little more than to pull his brother aside and shake something far closer to sense out of him. But then so much of it _does_ make sense for all the madness of his brother’s great game.

“But there is one tradition of our own I would see upheld,” the king remarks as if it is a simple thing, though the hungry watchful silence of his court of warriors says it will be anything but. Loki is unmoved, tilting his head so that the light catches again upon the jewels and gold strung through his dark hair.

“What tradition is that, Sire?”

“The one who fathered this other child upon you. The one you do this for.” The king leans back upon his throne carved of ice, an uncomfortable place for any to sit but those who had been born to such frozen lines. “You mean to be the consort of this Aesir?”

Loki blinks, only once. “Not precisely.”

“But he is to be named the father of your child.”

“Yes.”

Laufey rises from his throne, and Thor realises he has never seen the frost giant gather about him his full height, his undeniable presence and glory. His fingers tense about the spelled haft of hidden Mjölnir, heart beating a half-step quicker. But the king has no attention for him, only contemplation for his erstwhile son.

“It is tradition that should one wish theirs to be joined with the life of a Prince of Jötunheimr, that such permission ought to be requested from the King.”

“I see.”

“But he has not come with you.”

The faint mockery of this observation is meant to cut Loki; it barely seems to graze his pride as he gives a light shrug and states the obvious. “I have not my chosen here to do this thing you would wish of him.”

“I shall in his place.” Thor’s glamoured voice, roughened and provincial, is ill-fitted to the chamber of kings. It almost surprises him, reminds him to turn to Loki and bow his head in a lesser’s deference. “If you would permit it, my prince.”

As seems so common to this king, there is that flash of cool amusement amongst the stronger warning. “A thrall, Loki?”

This is the first time the king has spoken his brother’s name. It shudders through Thor like roused fury, his foreign body stepping forward with deep purpose. “I am loyal to the second Prince of Asgard, and I will be his champion if it is what is needful.”

Loki laughs to match his servant’s growing ire, light as ice though all know how far beneath the surface such chill will reach. “Unless you wish to meet my thrall’s challenge, Sire, I suspect you yourself shall be appointing a champion of your own.”

Thor can feel no surprise when he sees who it is to be: Helblindi, eldest brother to the prince Loki would have himself named as. Tall and broad, the creature is all brawn in his blue-horn skin. A fierce gladness rushes through him, for while he does not wear his own true skin he has wanted to do this since arrival. It is childish, perhaps, but then Thor had been born to battle.

_And Loki is my brother, not yours._

In the form of Eldir yet Thor leaves the sword in its scabbard, discarded to one side. Though it is functional enough in its glamour, Mjölnir’s song beneath is constant siren, summoning him home. He cannot risk it, not if this is how it is to be. Loki has made no effort to reveal Thor’s part in this and Thor will not force his hand.

They take the battle beyond the chamber of the king, to a great courtyard at the head of the palace. Stripped of cloak and all extraneous clothing, Thor feels the bite of cold air upon his skin, but it matters not. In this duel he will need to be quick and true. Blood will pump soon, and then spill hot across the floor. As Helblindi takes his place within the drawn circle Thor gifts him a smile that is all bared teeth and feral desire.

“Come, then.”

Helblindi’s own smile is that of a beast pawing the ground before a charge. “Yes, let us dance for the hand of your little princess.”

With a roar of fury, Thor is upon him. The clash of spell-worked iron on the ice-blade of Helblindi’s very body brings the sizzling scent of blood for all none has yet been spilled, hot iron sublimated into the air itself. With a vicious parry the Jötunn drives him back; Thor does know his temper to be a weakness, and yet he cannot regret it even as he smacks the back of his head against a pillar. The chortles and jeers of the circle of Jötnar swirl about him like a rising blizzard, and Loki stands silent at his sire’s side. From this place Thor feels again that dizzying sense of another time, of things that might once have been.

And in Loki’s hands, in the glow of the Casket held between them, everything changes again.

Battle is what Thor had been born to. Upon his feet again, he so very willingly gives all of himself over to its vicious joyful song. Against the unyielding brilliance of the sword-arm Thor cannot guard forever against the loss of his own far more pedestrian blade, but it matters not to him. Even without Mjölnir his body is a weapon, forged with strength and certainty. Despite the greater mass of the Jötnar, Thor knows his body with intimate understanding; he knows how to twist and turn and thrust in time with the berserker cry for blood and broken bone.

 The shouts and insults are almost evenly split between both combatants when Thor manages to climb upon Helblindi’s back, arm bent in a vicious headlock to hold him steady as he throttles the damned creature who could claim a bloodbond now denied Thor. Resentment burns through like acid fire, but Loki’s crimson eyes upon him are the colour of a bond far deeper than even that.

Eventually Helblindi twists enough to throw Thor from him. Fallen to the floor with a mouthful of blood, he spits it out with hardly a care. The great wad of well-won gore splatters across the ice even as the Jötunn presses his damned blade to the space between heaving collarbones.

“Yield, Asgardian.”

“You yield?” He gives a great shout of laughter, half-ruined by the breath he cannot quite catch. He never feels as alive as in the moments when death moves so close. Thor leans up into the Jötunn’s blade, feeling the ice slip along the line of his exposed throat. “Oh, come, that’s hardly sporting. I could go on for days yet.”

With a snarl, the blade retreats, stabs forward in a single brutal thrust. Thor has already rolled to one side, regaining his feet with the grace of one who has been trained in such since the moment he could walk. Falling back into low stance, Thor watches the king’s champion take his own, and bares blood-splattered teeth in a rictus of a grin.

But Helblindi chooses not immediately to attack, instead tilting his head to one side. “What care you for the honour of our runtling brother?” he asks, sudden and vicious in this new curiosity. “He is not yours.” And then amusement spreads across his broad features, thankfully so very unlike Loki’s own. “Or does he give himself to you, too?” The Jötunn leans forward from the waist, tongue dripping with the acid burn of cruel derision. “Does he share himself about all the Asgardian court, and servants alike?”

It happens then. Of course it is somewhat unintended, he tells himself later, but with that it really is very inevitable. Mjölnir screams across the distance between them, shedding her glamour as Thor throws off his own, the warhammer all bright fury to match the storm rage that renders Thor in all his own golden glory. The crimson cape whips about him like arterial blood as he raises Mjölnir to the sky, splits it asunder with lightning branched in the fashion of Yggdrasil’s spread branches. Roaring thunder follows to herald his arrival as he stands now before the startled Helblindi, and the court: each and every one stunned to still silence.

All except Loki, who has buried his face in one palm and shakes his head hard to match.

“Ah. The King of Asgard.” To his credit the Jötunn displays no fear at the awakened thunder god, for all Mjölnir alone might make a coward of even the greatest of heroes. “So here you are then, trailing your brother in the form of a thrall?”

Thor smiles. “Not this particular moment, no.”

Snorting, Helblindi runs one hand over the great ice-blade, shakes his horned head. “Like an overgrown hound, the same as the dog he names son,” he observes, and then he laughs. “What, does he fuck you too?”

“Yes.” Pleasant to a fault, Thor turns and nods to his brother. “It is my child in his belly.” When he turns back, all humour has vanished utterly. “And it will be my hammer in your skull.”

There is little enough competition in this now, when Thor raises his hammer and calls down what seems this time the very sky itself. He scarcely remembers any of it: the blow that shatters Helblindi’s blade, the swing that brings the giant to his knees. But he does remember the moment when a cold hand closes about his, when a furious voice says:

“ _Enough_.”

Loki yanks him back, turns him to face him, and him alone. Thor’s mouth opens in a snarl, and it seems for a moment his brother might slap him.

“Do _not_ kill him.”

Mjölnir is all silver fire in his hand, a storm that will be tempered no more than his hand will be stayed. “Why not?” he shouts, and Loki laughs. He just _laughs_ , and Thor can feel the energy of battle and bloodlust draining from him as if Loki had slit its throat clean through.

“Because it would be rude.” Thor’s eyes widen, and Loki’s lips narrow to a line almost unseen. “This is not a duel to the death, brother. It is merely an expression of worthiness.”

“He would have killed _me_!”

“He thought you a thrall.” And he presses hard on his lower arm, nails digging deep through the thin material. “Stop it. You have won.”

Lightning paints the entire chamber in ionised silver, and but a moment later thunder seems to rock the world from very foundation upward. Even as Thor smiles, Mjölnir in full song in his hand and his hair crackling about his head, roused by charge and wind alike, Loki rolls his eyes. Ice showers down from the great pillars about the courtyard of the winter palace, and all save Laufey must search for their footing. In turn Loki brushes at his hair, irritable as he gives his brother the full burn of an accusatory glare.

“Norns above and below, brother, must you always be so _dramatic_?”

And he cannot contain the laughter that booms out of him. “I am Thor, God of Thunder!” The name rolls about the great chamber, disturbing what seems the world entire with its fierce fury and force, a fresh flurry of loosed ice and snow. “How could I be anything but?”

The simple pleasure of his victory is arrested only by a slow clapping from above. Thor turns, cloak swirling crimson shield, to face the king where he stands at the head of the circle. Laufey’s great hands still, and his regal features are become a perfect mask of mockery.

“How like the Aesir, to keep that which is not theirs with such blatant conceit. You have bound him to you in a fashion stronger and darker than even your arrogant god-king of an Allfather would have dared.”

Thor smiles, and with it comes again the rumble of a thunder that had never truly slept; it is a promise, the words of a king ringing across alien sky, alight with charge and choice. “Loki belongs to Loki,” he says, the silver lightning in his eyes like summer storm across clear cold blue. “But he gives me his heart as surely as mine has always belonged to him. That is all the truth of the matter I need know.”

“And considering your people named my son the Liesmith, I do hope you will be satisfied with your understanding of this situation.”

“As I recall, you never named him at all.” Thor’s voice sharpens to a bloodied point.  “You have not the right.”

One hairless brow arches high, so very much a gesture Loki has inherited from this Jötunn king. “He wishes me to name him now.”

“As son,” Loki interrupts, mild and chilling as a winter’s still night. “But as I see it, the god names himself.”

Laufey’s own smile is the chill of perfect winter. “Perhaps the Allfather has taught you something after all, my silver-tongued bastard.”

“I am a king. I speak with kings. I know how this game is played.”

There they stand, then, amongst the ruins of the courtyard. The topography has changed, the ice transmogrified the way sand will crystalline to new form after lightning strike. But instead of buried underground these tower high, as if Thor had thought to remake this world anew himself.

“Then I shall name him Laufeyson,” the king says, and his voice is cold. “When he gives me what he has promised his people.”

And Loki’s smile returned is perfect crystal ice, as deadly as it is beautiful. “Come then, Sire – I have a gift for you.”

 

*****

 

The temple is cold, far colder than any other part of Jötunheimr Thor has seen thus far. It also hangs heavy with memory. Thor can sense as much in the tense lines of the king’s body, in the way even Loki will not speak in the hushed heavy silence of this unnatural place. Odin had taken him from this place when he’d been but days old; there is no way even his clever mind could remember anything of that day.

Yet Loki’s knuckles are white where they are buried in Fenrir’s thick ruff. Ever at his brother’s side, Thor leans close, whispers like the spring winds that end all winter. “Loki, you need not do this thing.”

Loki turns to him, utterly polite and patronising in the way Thor has seen him be only with people who are not him. “So you would simply give the Jötnar the Casket freely?”

“No!” It is too loudly spoken, this one word; he can feel the eyes of the king and his sons upon them both. Lowering his voice, Thor says with urgency: “But…he is your _child_.”

“Whom the Allfather would leave bound beneath Glaðsheimr until twilight falls.” The tightened hand loosens, strokes over the wild grey fur of his son. “Here, he is free.”

“This is not freedom.”

Loki looks up, but there is no anger to him now. Instead there is a patient kind of exasperation, and his hand is gentle when it reaches up, tangles in the hoarfrost ruin of his sweat-soaked hair. “You never see what is right in front of you.” The touch of his lips is cool and warmth both, and then he is encouraging Fenrir forward so they might follow. “Come, brother, we have something we must yet do.”

But Thor does not. “He will never allow this.”

Loki looks back, eyes narrowed. “Who will not?”

“Father.”

“Thor.” Into that faint laugh, he weaves the bitter thread of pity. “Do remember that even if Father were in the Odinsleep, he would still see all.” Then his gaze moves back to where Fenrir stands before the dais of the king and high priest, obedient always to the one who had given him life. Even in such cold, Loki’s smile is all heat and love. “But then, he is not sleeping.”

Making sense of what Loki does and does not say seems to always be a game Thor feels destined to lose. “He is consulting the deepest well of fate itself.”

“And we are drinking of it.” Loki’s hand closes very tight about his, and draws him forward with a strength Thor sometimes is fool enough to forget he possesses. “Come, now.” Crimson eyes flash with hot fire. “Or will you falter here when we have already come so close?”

“Ever since we were children, everyone always said you were the sensible one. That you existed to keep an eye on your elder brother, to temper him.”

Loki raises an eyebrow, but says nothing, and does not pull forward again yet.

“I am not certain that is how it is.”

“You believe I walk too close to the flame, perhaps?”

“No.” Thor’s grip is both so sure and so very very tenuous upon his brother when he grasps him now. “You _dance_ too close to it. Grace and pride and deep flaring chaos, flirting without care that with one misstep you might be utterly consumed.”

That sceptical eyebrow arches higher yet. “Poetry and sentiment.”

“Love,” he counters, and Loki just laughs.

“And love, too.”

And there is deep love in what Loki does next. The great wolf stands before him upon the dais of the king of ice and winter. The Casket in his hands is matched to his skin, the blue of the Jötnar; Loki stands naked save for a new bolt of intricate cloth about his slim hips, the belt curved beneath the swell of the child. Again, his Jötunn markings are traced with gold, loosed hair worked in braids and jewels. Thor knows intimately the application, the weaving; his own hands had done both, fingers trembling with Loki’s clipped instruction.

The Casket is now laid between them. Loki rests upon his knees, hands gentle upon its curve. He does not open it. None would be fool enough to do so. The working of this magic is something different, far quieter and more subtle; Thor knows so very little of seiðr, but he can feel the hum of it beneath his skin, the answering murmur of Mjölnir as Loki closes his eyes and gives something of himself over to the birthright he had not understood but had always _known_ all the same.

Laufey is silent and tall, standing behind them both. Thor does not know if the Jötunn king might wield seiðr in the fashion of his bloodson, considering Loki must have inherited it from somewhere, but it does not matter for in a sudden moment Loki slumps forward over the glow of the Casket. Thor moves to make to his side, but a faint whine comes from Fenrir, stills him. Loki looks up with a faint grimace, and shakes his head.

“Go.”

The great ears flick backward, and Fenrir does not move.

“Go, Fenrir.”

Still there is no movement in that great body, for all it seems the wolf actually comes closer to his parent. Suddenly Loki’s hands fall to the ice, cracking it beneath the weight of both his palms and his shout.

“ _Go_!”

The wolf turns and takes to swift heels, claws clicking on the ice steps with every bound sure and sharp. But upon its last threshold, where the ancient runes mark this place as holy and precious, he pauses, looks back over the great fluid shoulders. The intelligence of those eyes cannot be denied when they sweep about the room, over each and every one who dares stand within it. A warning growl births itself from deep in his throat, as if to say _I shall remember all these faces I see before me this day_.

Then he is gone, given over in alleged freedom to the great ice-plains of Jötunheimr, the land of his blood.

Loki rises, the Casket of Ancient Winters still yet held between his certain hands. His step falters not one moment as he takes it to the king, and holds it out with head high and his shoulders unbent.

“With this returned, you might return Jötunheimr to her former glory.” He smiles without humour. “Or you might plunge her to bloody war in the name of revenge and petty justice.” It passes between them, these words and this gift, and Loki steps back as his skin returns again to the pale of an Aesir prince. “Think upon your choices.”

Laufey is unmoved. “I am a king. It is what I was born to.”

“And therefore we shall take our leave of you now, Laufey-king,” and he bows his head, undisturbed by the cold when he again raises his green eyes to the one who had first given him the spark of life. In return Laufey nods, gives him the one thing Loki had come for.

“My son.”

“My sire.”

In their return to their shared chambers, Loki moves silent to the task of taking back what little he had left behind. The action strikes Thor as somewhat odd. Loki’s seiðr allows him to do often as he pleases, and he has always been very good at moving things, shifting their shapes and their temporal and physical forms. It almost seems as if he lingers in this place. Such behaviour disturbs him. Loki’s seiðr is certainly not muted here – on the contrary it seems sharper, more wild, almost a living thing beneath his skin. But it does not wear Loki; Loki bears it instead, a second skin of silver and gold and green.

When he finishes gathering his belongings, Loki wears again the great bear-cloak, dark as night with scattered jewels and golden chains about its shoulders. In that is rather like Loki has _become_ the bear: though in truth Thor tends more to think of Loki as some bird of prey, or a great cat stalking the mountain ranges in solitude. He thinks again of the wolf, and how he now runs free across the world that gave his father-mother birth a thousand years ago.

“This is how we remake fate, is it not,” he asks, sudden. “This is where everything changes.”

“Ah,” Loki says, turning at last from the ice-glass, “so at last you begin to see, perhaps.”

His words feel to be those of a skald, an epic tale penned by the hand of a master. “Fenrir, no longer bound beneath the palace. Jörmungandr, no longer the _Midgard_ serpent…”

“Two deaths, changed.” Loki has drifted close enough to place now one hand upon his cheek, easy cradle as the other moves again to the place where their child rest. “A new life, begun.” Then he steps away, casting a mischievous glance over one shoulder as he begins at last to make for the door. “You may not be clever as I am, brother mine, but then there is perception like lightning strike behind all the bluster of thunder and stormrain.”

Thor frowns, does not move. “I thought poetry was not to be part of our courting rituals?”

Loki pauses, a hand upon the ice of the door, and raises an eyebrow. “You need not be courted. I could merely tilt my hip and you would come running to my side.”

“You seem very certain of this.”

There’s little more than a curve of his body towards him and a bolt of sudden lust drives Thor those few steps forward, one opened hand automatically drawing his brother close. Loki’s own arm snakes about his waist, whispered words against quickening pulse.

“You were saying?”

He has to laugh. “Stop it.”

“You don’t mean that.” One hand has already wormed its clever way down, palming his cock in an expert grip even through the thick furs and leathers Thor must wear in this place. “Oh, you _liar_.”

“Ah, but then they call you the liar, yes?”

“Mmm, that they do.” To Thor’s disappointment his hand falls away, but frustrated lust is quite forgotten when Loki looks up to him and says, quiet: “Should I tell you, then, of another lie of mine?”

He frowns again. “Another?”

“Oh, yes, there is always another.” Locking their elbows tight together, he presses the door open and they leave their guest chambers behind. “Walk with me, brother.”

“We are going to the dark paths now, then?”

“No.” He keeps his gaze ever forward, his feet steady always upon his chosen way. “I rather thought a path of light would bear us home.”

Surprise has always made him appear quite the fool. “The Bifröst?”

“Come, then.” Impatient now, Loki stops only long enough to wave him forward, body worked in lines of clear irritation. “If you would have me walk in the light by your side, come with me _now_.”

“Always.”

What accompaniment they have is only in the background, the few frost giants trailing in their wake hardly noticeable. To Thor’s mind it feels as though it is just the brothers and the realm, which already seems to shift about them. _Returned glory_ , though Thor is certain the greatest treasure of Jötunheimr was lost long ago and has since chosen never to return.

There’s a sharp sense of loss, all the same. So much of his life in these months has revolved around his brother. But now he must give something of Loki back to Asgard. Much as he has never wanted to keep these secrets and lies between them, revealing the truth to all who have need of knowing will change everything. But they are princes. Their son will be a prince twice over. They belong to Asgard, and so does the truth of everything they are.

At the edge of this world, upon the site where they might call the Bifröst down, they are alone. This is the last moment, it seems. Loki smiles at him. No-one can hear them, of that he has no doubt; even Heimdall himself cannot see Loki when he does not wish it so.

“I spoke of a lie.”

“Is it Fenrir?” Hope has always been his favourite thing. “Is he to come with us?”

“No. Fenrir stays here.” With face raised, Loki works his eyes over the mountains: beyond and above hang the misshapen clouds that chase each other across the dusk-grey sky, blue in the face and pregnant with snow and ice. “But the Casket is not bound to his well-being,” he adds, quiet, and Thor frowns deeper yet.

“What?”

“Think.” Loki turns on him like a demon wrought of fur and snow, eyes sheened with crimson for all his form has not shifted. “Please, _think_.”

Something pleading beats hard at Thor’s mind as Loki’s sharp fingers dig deep into his skin through even the thick leathers. An almost desperate air has fallen over him like a transparent shroud – and a moment later understanding falls into place to join it, the pressure of sudden soft rains.

“You spoke the words to bind the Casket to your child.”

“Yes.”

Thor swallows hard, the words coiled in his throat. “To _our_ child.”

“ _Yes_.”

The words pour out of like rain, beating against his brother’s skin in the way his fists never could. “Loki, why?”

And Loki’s returned words are close to a scream. “ _Think_ , curse you!”

Beneath such onslaught Thor closes his eyes, mind awash with happiness and misery alike. “Because this way Fenrir is free.” When he opens them again Loki’s eyes are wide and almost childish, a mire of desperation and curiosity and wonder and pride. “Because this way you give our son the power to change his own life, should Laufey ever go back on his word.”

Loki looks away, just for a moment; when he looks back, his expression has turned strange, pitying. “This is not my world. It never will be.” He snatches up another breath, finds strength in it. “Even Asgard itself is not – nor Vanaheimr, nor Midgard, nor Helheimr, nor any other here or any other where. There is a part of me in all places, and in none.” One hand presses Thor’s lips closed, does not let him speak as he whispers: “I do not know what my child will want. But I will give that child all the choices I am able.”

When Loki’s hand falls away, Thor takes a deep breath and another moment entire before he dares speak again. “You could not have told me?”

Loki flinches, but just barely. “Would you have allowed it, if I had?”

“Would you have allowed it to be a question?”

For all the evenness of the question, there’s anger in it; Loki looks away one last time. “I am sorry.” He grimaces, hands made over into fists. “I _had_ to.”

And Thor is clasping his face between his, drawing him close, making him see. “I do understand. I _do_.” That damned clever mouth already opens to protest, to undo every word Thor would speak, but he will not allow it, shaking his brother like a ragdoll. “Loki. The happiness of our child is now tied always to Asgard’s fate.” And he smiles, painful and wide. “And woe betide the realm that should deny the child of our mingled bloodlines.”

In this he feels fierce, furious, proud. And there is fear, too, but gratitude is enough to wipe it almost clean away. And Loki blinks, surprise rendering his silvertongue something far closer to lead.

“You…you are not angry, then?”

“I am.” And then he shrugs. “But then I am the storm.” His lips are warm over his. “And you are its centre, and its eye.”

Loki smiles. Then, he turns his face to the heavens, and calls to their home.

 

*****

 

Heimdall seems unmoved, both by Loki’s request for the opening of the Bifröst and the fact that king and brother alike come through. But then Thor has never been particularly clear on what Heimdall understands of their bond in these days.

Loki’s abdomen is shielded again though since babyhood Thor has been certain Heimdall’s gaze can see through such illusion. _But it does not matter; he shall not be this way for much longer_. Such realisation is wrought of nervousness, and a fierce pride that sparks through him in the fashion of Mjölnir’s roused conduit to his power of storm and thunder. Thor cannot help but wonder how it will be, when the truth is revealed. Then he decides – _no, it shall be as we wish. I am king, and so too shall he be. Loki has planned the path, and I shall carve it clean, and then we shall walk it together._

The rainbow bridge is perfect song beneath their feet. They twine hands as they walk, needing no horses to bear them back to the city. At this moment the worlds seem to consist of little but the two of them together, and the third Loki bears secret and hidden yet.

A dozen Einherjar meet them at the bridge’s terminus, the great gates of the city opened wide for her princes. Mounted upon two familiar horses, they clatter together through the streets, a race designed to be neither won nor lost, simply indulged. Thor notes that no-one seems to have missed his presence over the last day and a half, though perhaps from the Bifröst’s arching across the spaces between realms they have determined some sort of arrival. _Perhaps they merely think that I met Loki returning from some duty, that I had been in enclave in his absence; surely Loki had planned for this. He has planned for everything._

When they reach the palace, they take the horses to the stables themselves. Thor has heard the unspoken need for Loki to see Sleipnir. But to their surprise the king’s steed is not alone. A slim figure in green and silver is within his stall, hair piled upon her head and bound in a net of emeralds, long strands of gold dangling from her ears. Her face presses to the great cheek of the horse, eyes closed and a smile upon her lips as their steps draw closer yet.

“My sons,” she whispers, without opening her eyes. Sleipnir gives a faint whinny, eyes opening. She mirrors the action, smiles wider, and extends one hand. A moment later it draws Loki close. His pregnancy is concealed again, but her other hand is light upon the illusion of his flat abdomen.

“Mother,” he whispers, and there is something odd indeed in that smile when she nods, her hand soft upon his belly.

“Your sons.”

Loki draws a shuddering breath, speaks as though sound will make a truth of every lie is he terrified of. “He will be happy there.”

“And you?”

One hand remains upon the place where his unborn child slumbers, but the other has raised to his cheek; it is the knowing love of a mother that moves it up, pushing back long black hair behind one ear. Loki closes his eyes, moves into the touch; despite the fact he has much height on his mother, he seems scarce more than a child as he sighs. “ _Yes_.”

She lays a kiss upon his brow, whispers something that Thor cannot hear, something that is between Loki and Frigga alone. Then she leaves Loki to Sleipnir, extends a hand to her eldest. “Walk with me.”

Such echo of Loki’s own words has him frowning, looking back to his brother. Yet Loki’s face buried in the mane, his eyes quite concealed. Frigga follows his gaze, shakes her head, one long finger to her lips. Arm in arm they leave the stables, but they do not take the path back to the palace. Instead they skirt the outside, moving towards the gardens that are, behind her sons and her loom, the place of her greatest creation.

Only when they are safe amongst the trees of one of her favoured avenues do they speak again. “Your brother needs his rest,” Frigga says, soft, and though there is nothing accusatory about those words Thor cannot help but feel stung.

“I did not—”

“I know,” she interrupts, and her other hands rises, gently pats upon where his is laced through her elbow. “You have duties of your own that have not waned in your minor absence, but they will wait until tomorrow morning.” When she looks up to him, her eyes are smiling. “Your friends have been looking for you.”

“I shall see them,” he decides upon the turn of a moment, but her hand tightens.

“Thor.”

He looks down, brow creased at the unnatural hitch in her regal tone. “Yes, Mother?”

“Your father will return this evening.”

A shiver rocks through him, and he cannot hide such from the clever eyes of his mother. They stop in the shadow of one of the great trees, and Thor finds himself tilting his head backward, looking up into the great canopy above. These are not Iðunn’s squat apple trees. Rather they are tall sentinels, far older than Thor himself, raised from saplings by the queen’s own hand. Asgard’s sprawling palace is at their end, guarded by great golden golems wrought by the seiðr and skill of the Allfather. Their shuttered eyes speak of watchful sleep, gauntleted hands ever over their swords and heads bowed in penitent patience.

The queen’s guardianship is something else entire. The whisper of wind through the trees can seem so simple to one who thinks only to hear and never to listen. But no being raised in the cradle of Yggdrasil’s branches would ever believe a mere tree, simple as it might appear, to be less than steadfast and true than those creatures that move freely upon the surface of worlds that give them life. They will likely outlive them all, much as Yggdrasil itself.

In that Thor can find easy the memory of a small child who had once nearly asphyxiated himself, playing with hempen rope upon one of Iðunn’s prized apple trees. “I was practising,” he had insisted later in the healing rooms, his mother both fretful and disapproving at his side. “Father did it, and Father is wise. If I wish to be wise, too, is it not something I should do?”

Thor had not understood it, making his brother swear he would never again think of doing what their father did; the thought of his brother hanging from a tree for any length of time, by choice or no, made him deeply ill. Even when Loki had given him a sly sideways look and asked _if it were for strength and a weapon which had no match, mortal or otherwise, you would hang from a tree for double that time, would you not?_

Loki always had known the price of truth, and the currency of lie.

“What will Father make of all this?” Thor asks, eyes still turned upward to where golden light filters through the leaves; Frigga’s own face is turned to the same, her eyes the same as his, glittering blue jewels in the gifted light.

“What he will.” Her sigh is soft. “Thor, I…”

The uncertainty there is so unnatural; his mother is a creature of purpose and poise, and he can count upon one hand the number of times he has seen her without either. “Yes?”

“I am sorry.”

She looks at him dead on, her pale features an open mask. Swallowing hard, Thor feels quite a child all over again. “For what?”

The smile she wears is as beautiful as is her quiet sorrow. “For what you suffered. For what you both have suffered. If I had known…but then, even then…” Her gaze moves back to the trees, to the broad sky above. “You will be happy,” she whispers, and the gladness in her words has a small laugh escaping from his chest, where his heart beats yet strong and true.

“I am certain of it.”

“And that is why I am, too.” Her kiss rests gentle upon his cheek. Then she is turning him, encouraging him back to the palace as she had done when he’d been but the height of her hip. “Go, then, and speak with your friends. They wait for you.”

The strange words of their mother still rest uneasy in his mind, the sheen of oil upon water, but his step has taken a lighter nature. Again he has come upon the realisation that he and Loki have been so tangled in one another, that the fact there are worlds beyond them both is something he has almost forgotten. The thought of drinks with his boon companions makes him grin wider; king though he might be for what remains of his father’s absence, there are still celebrations he might stand at the head of.

Sif and the Warriors Three can be found most often at their training, and that is where they are now as evening comes upon the city. Predictably enough, Sif wipes the floor with Fandral and Volstagg, though Hogun’s calm control has always given her battle enough. With arms over his chest and Mjölnir always upon his belt, Thor leans against the doorframe to the private salle and watches what seems to be in his mind an eternal tableau of friend and fellowship.

It is Volstagg who hails him first, looking up from rewinding leathers about the haft of his greataxe. “Thor!” The voice booms across the room, causing Fandral to falter and curse in his footwork and Hogun to land a blow somewhat unintended. Volstagg cares not for either, making a beeline for his prince. “Will you not join us?” he adds, though he has so enfolded Thor in an effusive embrace it is rather all he can do just to breathe.

When Volstagg finally releases him, it is Sif’s gaze who finds his first. “We’ve been searching for you. Your mother said you’ve been in private enclave. There…has there been trouble?”

There are a thousand more questions in her eyes, but then Sif has always known the worth of discretion, even amongst friends. “Of a sort,” he says, and gives her a smile that she cannot help but return. “It will soon be over. And much as I would enjoy a battle…” Longing colours every word as bright and myriad as the Bifröst’s bridge, but he shakes his head. His muscles still ache from the battle with Helblindi, and he knows they must talk. “Come, join me in our room.”

He speaks of one of the many conversation chambers within the palace, their favoured one a place they will often retreat to alone. The hearth-fire burns bright at its centre, his friends scattered now over the low couches that curve about its warmth. Sif, hair still damp from her bath, is the only one to remain standing. Her clothing might be loose and informal, but Thor knows from experience neither state would not impede her warrior’s instincts should she choose to exercise them.

“This is about Loki,” she says even as Volstagg reaches to fill his goblet, and Thor nods.

“It is.” His hands are held loose between his knees, and he looks to each of them in turn before he speaks once more. “There is something I would tell you, before all of Asgard becomes aware of it.”

“He is pregnant.”

Thor starts, stares, unable to hide how flabbergasted he has become. “ _What_?”

Volstagg merely shrugs, takes a long draught of his mead before going onward. “Hildegund has been often enough so that I would be fool enough not to recognise the signs.” The great warrior has the grace to look somewhat abashed, though there’s deep pride at the potency of his generous loins. But a moment later all humour melts from his broad face, eyes very grave. “And for all he hides his form, I…I should think he is some months along, is he not?”

Thor’s mouth goes very dry, and Volstagg’s pity is as generous and warm as his girth.

“Thor, Sif has already all but confirmed it.”

He cannot contain the hurt look he turns upon her then, and she shifts uncomfortable beneath the weight of it. “I did not speak of what you have told me,” she says, more defiant than defensive. “Volstagg drew his own conclusions, both to time and his state.”

Thor closes his eyes, does not know what to say. Oddly, it is the most taciturn of them all to break that silence.

“It is not the first time Loki has given much of himself for Asgard.”

Hogun’s words are a knife into his heart, and Thor must take a deep breath before he can speak again. “No. It is not.”

“He plans to bear the child as he did Sleipnir, then?” Fandral asks, almost incredulous, and Thor feels his hands move to fists. He can remember the cool serpentine skin, the warmth of a fur ruff, the bristly hair of an equine mane—

“Not as he did Sleipnir, no.” He draws in, expels a shuddering breath. “He would have the child known as all that he is and will have the potential to be.”

“A bastard half-Vanir,” Volstagg muses, but one eyebrow is arched in a way that speaks of a native intuition many cannot credit him with until it is too late. And Thor nods.

“The child is not of Vanaheimr,” he says, soft. “And despite the timing of the conception, the child shall not be born a bastard.”

Hogun’s quiet voice gives voice to what Volstagg has already seen. “It is yours.”

“He is.”

Fandral’s eyes go very wide, and despite his shock he looks put-upon by the fact that he seems to be rather behind everyone else on this matter. “He… _what_?”

There is much mead in the chamber already, and in this moment Thor wishes for little more than to drain a tankard before going on a moment more. But he presses clenched fists together upon the flat of his knuckles, and forces himself onward. He is a king now, and will be again in the future. “In Vanaheimr, Loki was…he did things not entirely of his choosing. But what he did with me, what we did together – we chose it.” He looks up, meets their eyes without shame nor artifice. “Everything we’ve done since has been because of that choice. To give our child the life he deserves.”

“Thor, this is your _brother_.”

“He is my brother,” he says, and his heart clenches. “And he is the Allfather’s son. But he was born of another.” A deep breath, and this, the last great truth, the last great mask, he must strip away. “Loki and I have returned just now from Jötunheimr.”

In such silence, in such stillness, the Warriors Three say nothing. But Sif’s gaze is all compassion even though she stands a warrior born and raised, and Thor takes strength from that.

“He is Laufey’s son.” Volstagg’s gasp is sharp, Fandral’s shock palpable; Hogun only raises his eyebrows, and not a one says a word as Thor goes on. “Loki is a runt he left to die. But Odin Allfather would not leave a child to the snows and storms, even if said child was born of both.”

“Born _to_ both,” Sif murmurs, and he turns to her – Thor, Stormlord of Asgard, and he smiles. He has never loved her more than he has in this moment.

“Yes.” And she returns that smile, crooked and very true, as he turns back to his greatest companions. “Of course, it goes very much deeper than what I have told you thus far. But this is what I want. What he wants.”

Fandral’s brow furrows. “What, to be your consort?”

“To be king at my side,” he corrects. “We were both raised to the throne. This is simply how it will be.”

There are more details to be spoken of that he leaves to lie now. Thor knows that the Warriors Three must be given the truth of it, in time. But Loki must be here for it; such truth moves unspoken between them, when Sif meets his eyes across the table.

_We have time, enough._

Instead, this is a peculiar celebration between Thor and his closest companions. Naturally Volstagg offers toast after toast, breaking them up only with some recently discovered delicacy amongst the plates of steaming food the servants bring them. A bemused Fandral falls to wondering if he has fathered a child recently that might be raised a companion for Thor and Loki’s oncoming babe. Hogun says little, as is indeed his wont, but after several tankards he emerges from silence with _he shall need a tutor_. The Álfheimr-forged knife upon the table leaves no question as to his loyalty; such a weapon is for the protection of oneself, and those one holds most dear.

Thor does not drink as much as his companions. But then neither does Sif, her watchful gaze never straying far from her friend. When Thor excuses himself – night is descending fast, and the Bifröst is bright upon the horizon – she comes too. Her step keeps in perfect time with his, the long ponytail of dark hair almost makes him wish to reach out to card his fingers through its familiar warmth.

“Do you think I have made a mistake?”

The sudden question does not surprise her. “No. Strangely enough, no.” Her smile is bright, eyes amused, but she still holds herself in the way of a warrior always ready for battle. “But it will not be easy.”

“I have always liked a challenge.”

One hand moves to rest upon his cheek. “You have,” she murmurs; it seems instinct that draws her close, has her rising up to press a chaste kiss to his lips to match her whisper. “Your father is home.”

His eyes widen so far he knows he must look quite the fool, and yet there is not a thing he can do about it. “How did you—”

“Your mother knows all too well that we women must have our little secrets.” And her smile is as sharp as her blades as she nods her head back towards the heart of the palace, and raises an eyebrow. “Go, then. Attend your king. We will all be waiting for you both, when you need us.”

In parting, Thor attempts to press a kiss to her hand; with the other she shoves him back, her grin a promised challenge. And then, he goes to where he is needed.

 

*****

 

Loki is not to be found in the stables, though Thor notes that Sleipnir’s coat gleams and his mane has been braided with leather and rough-hewn jewels that are like broken stars in the darkness. When he does find Loki, it is in his chambers. His brother sleeps in his own bed, the glamour gone again; he lies curved about his belly the way Volstagg will curl around an empty tankard at the end of a good night’s drinking. Thor grants himself a soft smile. He does not doubt Volstagg will spoil their child in ridiculous fashion, and name himself his champion should it be needful.

_It will not be needful. Our child will walk in light_.

Resting upon the edge of his brother’s bed, Thor leans down, blows gentle in his ear. Loki stirs but momentarily, the creases of his face smoothing back to sleep in but a moment. Thor smiles; he knows Loki realises it is him, otherwise there would have been a knife to his throat long before this moment. Leaning closer still, he does so again. This time Loki bats him away, cracking an eye open in a venomous green slit.

“ _How_ old are you, again?”

“Old enough.”

Thor’s broad smile makes him open both eyes, rolling them even as he twists from his cocooned state, languid as he stretches. It reveals his nudity, careless and raw as he purses his lips, tilting his hips so that Thor’s gaze must be drawn downward. “Peculiar, that – seeing as you seem to be acting like a very small child at this particular moment.”

His tongue wets his lower lip, and Thor chuckles. “Oh, I could wake you in other ways, I am sure.” This time when he leans forward it is to trail kisses along the ridge of collarbone; beneath the easy ministration Loki looses a sigh, relaxes his spine like water. Thor moves down his stomach, over the curve of their child, to the lazily rising cock beneath.

“ _Much_ better.”

“It is,” he says, with more regret than his lust should accredit. “But it cannot be.”

Loki only watches as Thor draws back, but there is a rising tension to the tilt of his head. “Why is that?”

Pushing too long hair behind one ear – he really does need to begin braiding it away from his face on a more regular basis, he thinks – Thor searches for an easier way to give the words, finds nought but honesty. “Father wishes a word with us.”

Loki frowns. “Odin is here?”

“The king has returned.”

In the silence Loki’s eyes turn to the sky, both hands rising to play gentle over the stretching skin about his navel. Then he closes his eyes, his lips turned upward in a faint smile. “So then I come, brother.”

A hand outstretched, and over their joining a long look passes between them. Thor is certain Loki knows it for the promise it is: _we will be as we are, and nothing else._

“Come, then.” Their hands close tighter together. “With me.”

Though Thor must let go long enough for Loki to dress, when they leave Loki’s chambers he does not let his hand fall again. The eyes of the palace are upon them as they walk the halls together, mildly bemused by the display. But then soon enough the eyes of all Asgard will be upon the brothers in bond rather than blood, though said bond is less fraternal than their upbringing might have wrought otherwise.

Odin Allfather awaits his sons in the chamber where he takes the Odinsleep, replenishing his power even as he dreams of his people, ever watching over them. But he stands upon the great balcony now, the bed empty and dark. There they go to him. Night has fallen, the sky alight with aurorae and rounded satellites of rock and ice that glitter all colours, the stars behind shifting like a kaleidoscope. All is familiar, all this is their home – and at its centre stands their father, the greatest constant of their immortal lives.

“I have spoken with the three.”

Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld: the unspoken names resound clear through Thor’s mind. They had been learned at the knee of mother and father, though he has never met a one of them himself. Few have. Even curious Loki himself has not, though he thinks of the one who had given Loki his true name and wonders.

Odin turns from contemplation of the eternal realm and all those below upon the turn of Yggdrasil, and Thor sees something held delicate between the gnarled fingers of his left hand, his single eye watchful and true. It is held out to Loki, and it is as if the glass is wrought of the same rainbow crystal of the Bifröst’s bridge itself.

“Urðr bid me grant you this.”

Thor is no scholar of magic and sorcery, either the old or the new. But he knows the way of the worlds, he knows that deep mystery upon which they all live. A sudden breath expands his chest like an expanding supernova, all sudden heat and impossible strength. Inside is snow-white clay, with water above—

“To her knowledge, you have succeeded.”

Loki says nothing with words. Instead his hands clamp over his lips, but even that sharp motion is not enough to contain the strangled sob that escapes his working throat. A moment later, he is upon his knees. Thor follows him down, arms strong about shaking shoulders. “ _Loki_!” His brother does not look up, and Thor must stare at their father for them both, his own eyes alight with the memory of the vault, of Loki bent before the glow of the Casket. “Father!”

But Odin is unmoved: the king is as if wrought of gold-gilted granite before his sons, Gungnir strong in one hand. And the vial remains extended. Loki rises alone, hands upon Thor’s shoulders, and reaches forward blindly even though his eyes are wide and all-seeing.

“I am fine. I merely…” His fingers close about the vial, and his smile splits his face in twain, even as it seems to Thor that everything is at last coming together the way it always ought to have from the beginning. “…thank you.”

Odin nods, slow, single eye upon Loki even as his youngest helps the eldest to rise. “I was a fool,” he murmurs, and shakes his head now. “I took you more for Asgard and my own ends than yours.” Now his attention moves to Thor, deep blue wisdom as hard-earned as it is hard-kept. “I took you as my son because I thought it would keep you apart.” Those aged fingers move over the grooved and runed haft of Gungnir, holding so tight that they whiten, and now he looks to Loki alone. “But how great a fool I was, to think I would not love you as one.” Thor has never heard his father’s voice break in such a way, as if the universe itself bleeds through the cracks. “In the end, I wish only for your happiness.”

Thor has always known to some degree of their father’s more easily expressed affection for himself than Loki. He has always thought it was because his brother had had less naturally in common with their warrior father. But Odin had been holding back, even as he knew already that he had lost that battle; when he speaks now, there are tears in his single eye, gathered and marshalled and released after a thousand long years.

“I am sorry, my son.”

Loki is very still, a statue even as he trembles like a baby bird left to die in a broken nest. “As am I…Father.”

Their embrace seems a private thing, father and son healing a wound that neither had known the depth of, that neither had realised had festered so. Thor thinks he should slip away, should leave them to the binding and healing. But as he quietly turns it seems he has not been quiet enough; Loki’s voice is ever the one that calls him home, calls him back.

“Brother.”

He turns, smile soft and true. “Call for me, when you have need.”

But Loki is bowing low to their king, taking his leave, crossing to his brother’s side. “Come with me.”

And thus they walk together, arm in arm, Loki heavy against his side. The eyes of those of the court and servants are peculiar upon them once more, but again Thor can think of little else but his brother even before he speaks in low whisper, the doors of his chamber closed against the world yet beyond them.

“Father will announce us.”

It shivers through him, fear and joy alike. “When?”

“Soon.” Loki’s voice turns uncertain. “If you still wish it.”

“Considering the bargain you made with Laufey before his court—”

“There are ways and means,” Loki interrupts, and there is a sudden cool tilt to his expression as if he has slipped upon yet another of his many masks. “The child can yet be named as anyone’s—”

“ _He is my son_.” The words are a proclamation, and though Loki is the only one present to hear them here and now, Thor knows that they are carved upon the trunk of Yggdrasil itself. “I would have the world know it,” he says, and his hands are tight as he draws his brother close, gives over urgent words. “I would have you always by my side.” Now their lips are together, foreheads pressed tight. “I as the king upon the storm, and you as the king amongst the court.”

Loki’s brow furrows and he draws back, something watchful and wary in his eyes. “Your consort, after all?”

“A diarchy.”

It is hardly the first time Thor has intimated as such, and yet Loki is taken aback. It hurts. Loki, so accustomed to lies, has always expected it even from the one whose greatest defence against such has always been simple honesty.

“Would…you not want it that way?”

“I should rather think it would be more appropriate for you to be concerned that the people should not want it. I am Jötunn—”

“You are _Loki_.”

The wry smile holds bitter laughter. “That is hardly better.”

And Thor shakes his head, flicks a hand in dismissal; he can almost hear the distant rumble of thunder, the strike of lightning that he could call so easily should he wish for either. “There is time enough for them to accept the truth,” he says, and then shrugs. “Father will live a long while yet.”

Loki has never been one to leave even the simplest truth to itself. “Fate has her vagrancies,” he counters, and Thor can only shrug once more.

“And so too do we all.” His gaze is strong upon his brother, but uncertainty still wars with the bone-deep knowledge that this is how things must be between them now. He still fears that they have done not quite enough when he voices the question: “ _Would_ you hold the throne with me?”

And Loki only smiles, his silvertongue given over to a simple single word. “Yes.”

He kisses him deep then, as if drinking of him even as he gives everything of himself over to his brother. It makes him think of the vial, and as if reading his mind Loki presses it into his hand. Thor raises it to the light, eyes creased at their corners as he takes in its stark simple beauty. “A gift from the Norns,” he murmurs. “It is said water from the Well is what keeps Yggdrasil ever in life.”

“Yes,” Loki returns. “It is a blessing.”

“We have succeeded in protecting our child.” Thor lowers the vial, gives his brother a lopsided smile. “It was…easier than I had thought.”

“So say _you_.”

“Loki.” And even as his brother snatches back the vial, Thor presses fingers to his chin, tilts his face upward. “Never doubt that I love you.”

Silence reigns in both his eyes and his lips, and Thor lets the warrior rumble into his voice, every word a dire promise.

“Never allow another to touch you as they did.” He can feel the sky move uneasy with his oath, but he cares not; let all Asgard see their prince-king makes no frivolous promise. “It was not deserved. You are a part of me, and have you ever known me to take a blow and not return it in kind?”

“Often you return it with considerable interest.”

At the wry disgust in Loki’s words, Thor must smile. “You love me for it.”

“I do,” he says, and before Thor can react to such uncommon honesty Loki shakes off his amusement, expression turning very grave. “But you are right. It seems…given the words Father said in the vault when all this began…” He turns the glass over in his hands, the waters of the well clouded by the rich white clay that so feeds Yggdrasil. “…it almost seems too easy.”

“Fate changed. He must have realised as much.”

“Perhaps.” Then he snorts, gives his brother a deeply wry look. “Or maybe the time away from Asgard did him good. Perhaps he should wander the worlds more often, as he did in his youth. Surely he misses it.”

Thor feels a tug of his own at that; much as he himself enjoys haring about the worlds to find fresh hunts, to heave himself into new battle, the spirit of pure wanderlust is something that Loki has more in common with Odin. “Yes, that could be true enough, although…it hasn’t been that long since last he went.”

Loki shrugs more with his expressive lips than his shoulders. “Years and years.”

“No, no. He went when Mother last banished him from her sight. That wasn’t so long ago.”

“I do not remember this.”

“Oh, well, when I think of it, you were not here. You were off wandering yourself, some three summers—” Thor stops dead, feels himself go very cold, then very hot. If he could have snatched the words back from the air that has borne them aloft already, he would have. But for all his strength, for all his storm, Loki’s pale face tells him that it is altogether too late.

 “It was Odin.” The whisper is like a death knell, a barrow heaped with fresh earth and stinking of death. “The ferryman who told me my name was the Allfather.”

Thor’s head aches almost as much as his heart. “And he was sent to do so by the Allmother.”

Loki closes his eyes. Sudden terror charges through him, every muscle desperately alight as Thor reaches for him, feeling as though Loki is falling, slipping away, letting go. “Loki. Loki, _no_ —”

“Stop.” Loki is very still in his arms, and his eyes open. So very green are they against the pale features, like fresh green shoots reaching up through the snow. And his smile is tears made over into something like sorrow, something like wonder, and then he laughs. “It is fine.”

“I…no, it’s not.”

“It is.” When he moves, it is swift as it is sudden, long fingers against to his cheeks so he might pull him down until their foreheads press together. By reflex Thor reaches back and they hold each other, cradling neck and head as Loki nods, brief and fierce. “The Allfather changed my fate once, and I suspect Mother saw the weave would not hold.” Again he smiles, that broken thing that seems to have been made this way. “Then, she never wanted it to. Fate is like a river; it will correct itself to course.”

“Our child,” Thor whispers, terror quickening in his veins, thunder rolling in the far distance. But Loki shakes his head and Thor’s does the same; he does not know if he merely mirrors Loki, or if Loki’s strong hands force the denial from him.

“Our child.” For a moment his eyes flicker away, and when they return they stand with tears above the simple smile he wears, naked as he had been before Thor that day all so long ago in Vanaheimr.

“I suppose I ought to tell you now.”

His knees are water, but he is frozen in place and does not move. “Tell me what?”

“Our child,” he says, slow. Then, he laughs, as if he cannot quite believe his own words. “Our child is to be a daughter.”

“ _What_?”

Loki lets go then, takes two steps back, a magician surrendering the last of his secrets, revealing the slight of hand behind his greatest trick. “The prophecy spoke of a child – of a son, specifically.” Hands come about his waist, cradling the ever-growing swell of the babe within. “That was the true reason I needed to sacrifice those Vanir seiðmaðr. Not because I needed to conceal then what I had done.” For all the fierce pride in his own work – Loki has so enjoyed the role of gamesmaster – Thor senses sorrowful, quiet shame as Loki drops his gaze to the solid ground beneath his stilled feet and whispers, “It was the only way I could have strength enough to alter it at the precise moment of conception.”

“The child’s gender.”

“Yes.” Thor does not even recall moving; it seems to him that one moment they are apart, and the next he is tilting Loki’s face up, between his hands when the tear tracks a silver trail down his too-pale skin. “It was that,” he whispers about his ever-present smile, “that, and the power you gave me in perfect love and perfect trust.”

One thumb moves, brushes it away. “You’ve known all this time.”

“Of course I have, it is what I wanted.” Impatient, now, Loki jerks back, turns away. He does not go far – he cannot go far, and Thor trails him at a slow pace. Loki stops a moment later, Thor’s hand upon his shoulder.

“Why did you not tell me?”

“Because it was not something you needed to know.”

“But it was proof—”

“ _It was not something you needed to know_.”

Loki’s words are unnaturally loud; they echo about his rooms, a compulsion to match his earlier words of _think, brother, think!_ “Because you wanted me to prove myself.” A headache begins behind one temple; Thor rubs his head, wincing even as his grin turns crooked, rueful, and very very proud. “Oh, Loki, why must you always make everything this complicated?”

“If you must ask, then even now you will never understand.”

Loki’s mercurial temper has always turned upon the slightest of moments, the merest moment of slight. He is already storming towards his inner chamber; Thor crosses the room in three long strides, but does not reach out this time. “Wait.” Loki pauses before the door; his hands flex to fists, but he holds his place. “Loki, I am sorry.”

The furious glare pierces him as surely would an actual blade, fingers digging into the carved frame of the bedchamber door. Then he sags. “No, _I_ am sorry.” When he looks up, the eyes are haunted, dark. “I was so afraid. All the time.” A hand again moves over his abdomen, shoulders hunched forward though he no longer looks away. “I always suspected Father knew what I had done, though he doubted it would change anything. He had enough experience with the attempted perversion of a prophecy to understand that it would likely end only badly for us all.”

“He expected the child to…” He cannot even say it. And Loki shudders, closing his eyes.

“She almost did.”

“What do you mean?”

The opened eyes are a doorway to a horror that had been too very close for it not to have become a constant thread in the weave of his nightmares. “When you reached for the tesseract. Do you remember?”

Thor remembers Loki, hands about his abdomen, falling to his knees with hair hanging in his face: looking upwards, his mask fallen to leave nothing but the misery and pain and hope forever beneath.

_(“Oh, **Thor** , how many times must you fall for this?”)_

Horror churns in his stomach, roiling acid distilled from a guilt he had not even known was his own. “I almost undid everything.”

“No.” Loki speaks fierce, and true. “You made it strong. You took my weave and pulled it taut and tight and true.” Thor cannot look up, not even as Loki steps close, tries to pull his hands from his face. “Mother would have done it herself. But she could not.” His voice is urgent, true. “This was our fate to alter.”

But Thor slips to his knees, a great tree fallen in a forest where everyone might hear him fall. In this he is the penitent, both to Loki and the child. Their _daughter_. With closed eyes, he moves so that cheek and ear might press to the soft leather over the swell of his belly, cool veined marble an anchor beneath his knees.

_She will be safe. She will be true. She will be **ours**._

“Can I name her?” he whispers, sudden.

“Oh, for…” With long fingers tangled through his hair, Loki gives a warning tug. “…go on, then. Do your worst.”

“Friþuz.”

“I…” There is a pause, and a put-upon sigh Thor has heard a thousand times over since Loki had been old enough to realise it was his job to reign in the worst of his elder brother’s excesses. “…it is not inappropriate. I suppose.”

Grudging as such words cannot help but be, Thor looks up with a smile. “Although I shall call her Frith.”

The hand through his hair stills, then begins again. “Frith.”

“Frith.”

With their daughter’s name carved onto the very air between them, Loki guides him to his feet. Hands tangle when Loki curves into him, as if they are one already even as they move into the bedchamber. There Thor carefully, slowly, strips him bare as Loki does the same for him. When they naked, when there is nothing between them but the limitations of flesh, Loki draws him down to the bearskin before the fire, and draws him in with scarcely a whisper or moan.

“I almost wish she did not have to be born.” Thor smiles down at Loki, almost shy. “In this, we are all one.”

And Loki rolls his eyes. “If you believe I will carry a child unto eternity simply for your idiot romantic notions, then you are a fool even greater than I’d ever thought before.”

“Oh, come, brother, you always _knew_ that.”

He expects more mockery. Yet Loki’s expression has softened, is almost dreamy as Thor moves in a shallow thrust. “But I understand.” He looks away, to the embers of the dying fire that paints them in crimson light and grey shadow. “I miss them, always.”

The sorrow of the distance is written deep and true in those averted eyes. With but a moment’s thought Thor can recall the slide of serpentine skin beneath his fingers, and the scent of the soft rain-soaked earth of distant Vanaheimr. “We will bring him back,” he whispers, fingers a gentle card through Loki’s long hair. “We _will_.”

“Ah, but then fate is a fickle thing.” Beneath him Loki moves, fingers light about his jaw as he draws him down, passes a cool tongue over his lips. “Perhaps we should be grateful for how we have shifted its kaleidoscope already.”

“You know me, brother.” He cannot help a jerk of hips; from the sharpness of an indrawn breath and the baleful look that follows, he had found his target. And he smiles, stills. “I’ll fight anything once,” he adds, and then grins wider yet. “…and then probably a half dozen times more simply for the sport of it.”

“Oh, do be quiet,” he says, the hand now upon his shoulder closing deep as he moves his own hips, a frown marring his face. “And fuck me while doing so, would you?”

He does not move, gives his brother instead a disapproving look. “Hush, Frith can hear you.”

Loki’s eyes roll skyward, hands falling to the rug in despair. “By the Norns, could you possibly ruin the mood any more than you have already?”

“Quite possibly,” he replies, and they both know it for the truth it is even as he leans close, presses a kiss to the leaping pulse of his throat. “But then I am yours, and you are mine, and I do rather believe that after all _this_ we are rather stuck with one another.”

“Remind me after this to go seek Urðr, and drown myself in her damned well.”

“Never.” Thor rolls his hips forward, strikes again that place that melts Loki all to water beneath his trembling hands. “This is where we dwell, far above.” And even he can taste the thunder when he presses another kiss to one eye, the next, then the stilled lips below. “In this, our golden heaven.”

Loki smacks him, hard. “I distinctly remember telling you _no more poetry_.”

But there is, soon enough, both in the movement of body and soul – and then, in the release that follows. Between them words cannot help but be made action true and strong, and there is forever nothing sweeter than when the story ends only to begin always and ever again.


	17. The Peace Which Passeth Understanding

**Epilogue**

Laughter moves through the air, light as the sun’s warmth. “Father!” Her voice is sunshine made solid, bright and blinding. “Father, you must come see this!”

He could hardly miss her, she his daughter: as tall and lanky as her mother, with the same dark hair in a tight braid; it swings like a pendulum as she races across the meadow. The fierce cry of the horse beneath her acts as perfect harmony to her undulating melody, as if they are but one being split into many parts.

Such thought aches, in heart and in spirit, even as it makes him smile. Loki’s children are scattered across the realms, save for these two. It makes them precious, but hardly delicate: a warhorse and a warrior-princess, fire flying from her hands as she screams about the meadow.

_You must let her go, now_.

He will. He knows in the end there is little other choice. But it seems hardly long enough since she had been but an infant, a mere babe in her swaddling clothes. There remains only the faintest memory of that tiny visage in the long lines of her laughing face now, in the flash of seiðr in her eyes like blue storm.

Crossing great arms over his chest, he must smile to remember her beginning. The birth can hardly be forgotten, for all the time both true and imagined that lies between the reality and the memory. Frith had been determined to come a half-turn of the moon early; it has continued throughout her life, for while her father is still perpetually late to gatherings both social and of state, Frith has an understanding of punctuality equal to Frigga’s.

Though neither had quite expected Frith so early, their intimacies had dwindled in the final weeks of Loki’s pregnancy. There had been no regularity to their couplings, given Loki’s mercurial temper and general discomfort the larger he grew. Thor generally felt glad just to be permitted to hold Loki close whenever his prideful brother admitted he needed the comfort. If he himself had to be content with little more than his own hand when his desire grew great, then that was but a lesser price to pay for the miracle still yet to come.

But the night before Frith’s first day, things had changed one last time.

 

*****

 

_Loki is a slender silhouette in the darkness for all the swell of his front. His eyes are fixed upon the view far beyond his window, as is often his wont; Loki has ever been an observer, pulling the strings he has woven from the darkness others are too foolish or too proud to step within. But Thor knows no fear of such things, will move freely into those shadows so he might stand at his brother’s side._

_Yet it is not quite what he expects. The robe Loki wears has no belt, hangs open down the middle to reveal a long line of pale skin beneath its black silk. One hand rests over his belly while the other curves up from below, near silver-skinned in the light of the full grey moon._

_With eyes kept upon the far distance, Loki does not look to him. A stirring awakens low in his own abdomen – but Thor tamps it down, presses it back. They have almost forever for this which exists between them always, and he is no green boy who cannot hold his own selfish desires as he waits for his beloved to give birth._

_But for all nothing has been said between them Loki is aware of his presence. Eyes, more black than green in such darkness, flick to move over the long lines of his own body. Watchful and silent, Loki says not a word as the lowest hand moves. Thor’s gaze drops with it, involuntary and inevitable. The shadow between his thighs sends a fresh frisson of strange energy down his spine. It is not just the swell of the belly that makes it odd; for some weeks now there has been something different there. Thor knows as much only from half-dreams, for Loki will not let him touch. It is too sensitive, he gripes, and not something he cares to indulge in the exploration of when it exists for the purpose of something else entire._

_His hands curl fingers to palm, and he gives his brother a soft smile of question and care. “Are you tired?”_

_“I am always tired.”_

_Though Loki chose faint mockery for tone, Thor can see the truth of it in every inch of his swollen body. “Shall I prepare a scented salt bath for you?” Though he knows he sounds a fool, he cannot help the hopeful tone to his voice. “I could wash your hair, perhaps?”_

_The knowing smile he wears says enough quite on its own. They are both aware that Loki understands very much why Thor often aids him in bathing. Though he_ is _very good at it, hands both strong and knowing over the aching muscles of back and leg and shoulder, Thor has not artifice enough to conceal the ulterior motive. If this is the only way he can touch Loki, slick with scented soap and skin heated by the steam rising off the water, then that is what Thor will accept. It is counted but as a bonus that occasionally Loki will permit him to bring him off with his mouth. Oftentimes Loki himself has done for Thor with finger and tongue alike, though anything more has fallen by the wayside._

_Still, for all the warmth of the smile, Loki shakes his head. “No, I have already had a bath.” Stretching, the gap of the robe gaping further open, he fixes his eyes upon his brother and his smile vanishes entire. “Take me to bed.”_

_“As you wish.” Thor closes a hand about his, more brotherly than that of a bound spouse. But Loki does not move, his immobility holding them both back. With a frown Thor turns, looks back to his brother against the glass, the city a sea of stars beneath a sky of the same behind and beneath them both._

_“Take me.” His eyes are darker than the night with pupils wide and welcoming, an invitation to the fall. “_ To bed _.”_

_The energy that moves through him crackles like branched lightning, setting every inch of his skin to sparking life. “Loki—”_

_“You do not misunderstand.” Arms drape over shoulders, great curved belly pressed close. “I want you. Inside of me. Upon me.” The tongue leaves off from speaking long enough to lave a line over the shell of one ear before the teeth bite deep, drawing blood. “I_ need _you.”_

_He should say no. It is something that has happened often between them, these fool times when Thor should simply have denied Loki the strange things he asks of his brother. But then he’s never been able to. People call Loki the liar, but in many ways those lies have been the only filters through which the truth can be discerned and borne._

_Loki draws his hand back. His hair is much longer now; he’s been disinclined to cut it since Midgard, and it has taken an odd wave the longer it has become. It melds into the dark shadowed fabric of his robe until his hands rise. Unbelted and open, it leaves Loki’s body half-wrought in shadow. But when he pushes it back, when it puddles at his feet, he is all pale glory, silver light piercing the darkness._

_Thor is struck with a strange urge to snatch him from that darkness at his feet as if it might swallow him whole – as if Loki might even throw himself into that void. The weight of him is heavy in his arms, and yet light: this is his family, whole and entire, borne in the body of the brother in his grasp. He could carry such until the end of everything and then walk nine thousand steps more._

_He had thought Loki would protest such manhandling. Certainly he had always loathed it when they’d been children. Even as they’d grown, even after Thor had been gifted Mjölnir and had learned to bear himself aloft upon her lightning-strength so he might charge across heavens both familiar and not, Loki had never enjoyed being pulled about in his wake. That knowledge had brought regret; Thor had rather liked the sensation of Loki wrapped about him, even if the reality had more often than not been accompanied by harsh nails in his skin and shouting in his ear._

_But Loki speaks only with fluttering touch, dilated eyes. He is still in his arms and yet he is all movement, light and shadow chasing one another in endless dance across his skin. With great care Thor lays him down upon the bed, though he does not join him. Not now. Not yet. Instead Thor goes to his knees with elbows balanced upon the side of the bed. Loki turns his head, eyes all shadow and strangeness._

_“A penitent about his worship, are we?”_

_“I love you.”_

_The lips curve. “I had noticed.”_

_“I always will.”_

_This time he reaches out a hand, curls the long cool fingers about his jaw. The long strands of hair he has caught there are woven tight about his quicksilver fingers. “I know.”_

_“Truly?”_

_Loki’s eyes never drop from his, wide and unblinking. “Truly.” There is no time to search for lies in such whispers, for Loki moves forward, pulling Thor to him by his neck as he murmurs into his lips: “But I am not in the mood for sentiment, brother. Strip, and join me. I want your cock tonight.”_

_Such words are but crude enough for shock, but Loki speaks them with a strange sort of softness that shivers through Thor, leaves Loki near vulnerable to his gaze. Thor rises. He wears nothing elaborate, and is well accustomed to shedding clothes quickly; such is the life of a soldier born and bred. Loki does not even complain when he leaves the clothes upon the floor and comes to his bed._

_When he lies before him, they are both on their sides. Thor reaches out, runs a hand from shoulder to hip, indulges in but the briefest grasp of buttock. Drawing forward again, he lets his palm rest in the shallow valley of his thickened waist. “You said no sentiment,” he says, gentle in the brief space between them, “so how do you want this?”_

_In truth Thor expects him to roll over, to press one leg forward, to allow him to slip in that way. While Thor has never lain with one pregnant so advanced in proceedings, there are books of every subject in the library. He might even have thought Loki would be proud of his efforts, if not for the fact he’d been more interested in the illustrative instructions than the written ones._

_Loki surprises him. One hand rises; the vial of oil cupped within the palm catches the light, scatters it like a lens. But he does not press it upon the fingers and palm he takes from Thor. Rather, he takes those fingers deep in the smiling curve of his mouth. The tongue twists about them the way he does with words; silver-sharp in the light nip of his teeth. Then it plays over the sensitive skin between fingers, where the calluses do not stretch, teasing and true._

_When it comes the oil is warm, holding a rich scent like the sea. It is not the cold frozen waters of Jötunheimr; these are summer waters, reminiscent of the sheltered bays where they’d swum at play, two boys. They are grown and gone now, those children, and a child new between them. But Thor remembers the laughter: how they’d lain in the golden sand, fingers tangled together, watching the clouds spun out across the sky. They’d seen such different things in that which their mother’s loom had woven; Thor would name weapons where Loki always had words to string into full song. But for their differences, they had ever been so certain in their futures, and that they would be together._

_“Love,” he says, so quiet. And Loki smiles._

_“Love.”_

_It is Loki who raises himself to hands and knees, moving so that Thor is positioned behind him. But even as he moves to place his hands upon his hips, to draw him close against the oiled heat of his cock, Loki cannot mask his groan, the crack of a spine under strain._

_“Are you well, brother?”_

_“I’m the size of a whale,” he gripes. “How well could I truly be?”_

_“You are still beautiful.”_

_“Thor,” he says, voice thrumming with frustration, “I am on my hands and knees before you, quite desperate for your cock in my cunt. There is no need for foolish poetry and sentiment, you can fuck me all you like.”_

_And Thor must pause, sitting back upon his heels. “What if it’s not about fucking?” An irritated face glances over one shoulder, but he is resolute. “What if I just want to be in you, always?”_

_Loki snorts. “It would be most uncomfortable and your advisors and envoys would be quite scandalised.”_

_“So you’d rather enjoy it?”_

_“I…well. Perhaps.”_

_There seems no logical way one might contain such a swell of deep love, and thus Thor allows it to rumble through his chest with all the ease of long laughter. “Is it that you wish me to show you to the world as mine, or that I am yours?”_

_“Can it not be both?”_

_“It can be both.”_

_He does not think this will be something often allowed, to place himself in his brother’s body this way. It is peculiar, too; his fingers find a woman’s heat, but his other hand is upon his chest, firm upon the flatness over his heart as he gently twists one nipple between two fingers._

_“Is this not uncomfortable for you?” he asks even as his own pleasure demands he speak no more and take what is offered with no further words. Loki shifts beneath him with a faint sigh._

_“Being empty is.” One hand moves backward, closes gentle over the heavy weight of a heated cock. “I wish not to be empty.”_

_“You have_ never _been empty.”_

_A second sigh sound something like mourning, and Loki let him go. Leaning forward now, he takes the weight of both self and child upon his braced arms, hips canted upward, body exposed and waiting._

_“_ Please _.”_

_Thor slips into the heat his brother’s body offers him, gentle and slow. Laughter and tears sound so often the same in Loki’s lilting voice. So badly does he want to see Loki’s face, but he is stubborn. Strong hands must ease him back once, twice, three times before he gives in, before he allows Thor to have them lie side by side. Tilted upwards, Loki turns his face back, almost resigned. Thor’s voice is hollow whisper, heavy in his throat._

_“Don’t go on too far ahead,” he whispers. “Without me.”_

_His brow creases in uncommon confusion. “I am in your shadow.”_

_“But you always walk ahead of me, laughing.” He pushes deeper, feels his brother’s gasp in breath and body both. “Wait for me, brother.”_

_Such gentle rhythm; it is so unlike their usual frenetic couplings which are closer to their games of childhood given over into adult hands. But in this it is quiet, and Thor keeps one hand over heart and child both, rocking into him as their lips meet, breath and word stolen away._

_It seems both a long time, and no time at all before the ease gives over to something more driven, more frantic. When Thor has spilled, he withdraws after but a lingering moment in that gifted warmth. Languid though he is entire with release, his thoughts are only of Loki when he takes his fingers and slides them into the heat dampened by his own seed. Canting them upward, he presses the pad of one broad thumb over the place that brings sharpest pleasure even as he closes his mouth over the leaking cock._

_He keeps his eyes open. He wishes to watch. He wishes to see._

I only wish for your happiness.

_Such words are unspoken, but Loki reads words in many places where others do not even realise they are written. His thighs take on a deeper tremble, entire body drawing up tense and true. The obvious turn of the babe in his womb is like an echo, moving with the rhythmic contractions of the cocoon that holds her close, keeps her safe._

_Both are exhausted after; it would not have been strange at all, had they both surrendered to sleep without another word. But Thor bears Loki into the bathchamber, and into the great tub of water; there he carefully cleans him, then allowing him to half-drowse in the moving waters as he does the same for himself. Everything is tender and silent, and so very near perfect it might have been all a dream._

_But when he curls about his brother, Loki laughs. Thor gives him a startled look, and Loki’s eyes are the truth of deep mischief itself._

_“Next time,” he whispers, “I think_ you _shall carry the babe.”_

 

*****

 

When she dismounts she flicks her long braid over her shoulder, shading her eyes with one hand as she looks back towards the palace and the city beyond. “Where is Mother?”

“Still arguing with your grandfather, likely as not.”

“Likely as not,” she echoes, a devious smile upon her lips. The broadness of it has oftentimes surprised Thor given the similarity it holds to what he sees himself in his morning mirror, for all her high-boned features hold more the shadow of her mother.

Then it fades, and Thor feels a distinct chill upon his skin.

“I know what he wishes,” she says, soft, “but then I cannot help…”

“Yes?”

“That it could be only but us.” Her eyes have moved to Sleipnir, one hand rising to rest unthinking at the circle of runes she wears about her throat. “And Grandmother, and Grandfather, Vár…even Hel and Fenrir, if they could but come to us here.”

The tightening of his heart feels a noose about his throat, condemnation and its consequence both. Frith has never been a child left alone; from the beginning she had grown up in a palace surrounded by other children brought to court to be her peers and playmates. Yet almost as soon as she could speak she had often asked after a brother or sister. It was not that she regarded Loki’s other children as anything less; her bond with Fenrir was fearsome, and she had learned to ride upon her grandfather’s warhorse when many of the stablehands could not even think to handle the steed. There had been, too, a reciprocal fondness between this future queen and Hel herself, for the little her duties permitted her to come to Asgard.

Thor would gladly have given her a half-dozen siblings or more. But Loki had never cared to try.

_Or perhaps it was he cares too much_.

“But then I suppose that is the lot of a princess of Asgard – ceremony and pomp, yes?” Something amused shimmers in her eyes and blue as they are, they are not those Thor himself had inherited from Frigga. These are the same shade as Odin’s, deep and divining. There’s something odd in that, seeing them twinned where he had always only known his father’s stare as a single knowing eye.

“It is – and you will one day be Queen,” he says, the words warning and gift alike. In her leathers she shrugs, hand light upon Sleipnir’s flank.

“You are not even king yet.” Her eyes move to the distance, to the worlds beyond that call to her wild heart like siren song. “It will be a long time before I sit Hliðskjálf.”

_In a way you already have_ , but he will not tell her that. Such memory actually brings a faint flush to his cheeks, which she catches; her frown is half-concerned, half well-learned trepidation.

“Are you…unwell, Papa?”

“Not at all.” Clearing his throat, he raises an eyebrow and gives a brief chuckle. “I simply dread to think what sort of temper your mother might be in, when he is quite finished perfecting your banquet.”

“I certainly pity anyone who must engage him in a flyting tonight,” she says with the wryness of long experience. Then she looks sideways, sharp and deadly. In that, there’s almost something of Sif in her – though then it is not perhaps so strange when it had been Sif who had taught her that which her father could not. But for all her prowess as a warrior, for all she is not a seiðkona on a level with her mother, Frith has magic in her. It shimmers from her, and even Thor can feel it.

And though she is the one to look first Thor feels it too – the approach of another. Slim and sleek in black leathers, he fumes even as he trades words with the elder man at his side.

“Mother!” Already Frith has the wind at her heels, flying across the field to them both. “Grandfather!”

The embrace is deep and true, one given each to each. When she returns to where Thor has remained, her hand has locked tight about her grandsire’s vambraced wrist; it is the effusive enthusiasm of a child mingled with the strength of a manacle. Odin is barely permitted to raise an eyebrow to his sons before Frith drags him to where Sleipnir patiently waits his two masters.

“Do I dare ask what the issue is?”

“You do not.” Loki scowls, but there’s something almost wheedling when he casts his eyes to his brother. “Though I would be most appreciative if you would take that great hammer of yours and drive it through Forseti’s skull before the first course.”

“Mother _did_ say there was to be no bloodshed at table.”

Loki snorts as though such restriction has never been a deterrent before; Thor must shift uncomfortably when he realises the observation is not without accuracy. “You could do it before he enters the great hall.”

A subject change seems rather in order. “Are you troubled still?” he asks, a fraction too loud; from the _look_ this earns him, Loki is quite aware of the thought behind such a clumsy manoeuvre. Still he sighs, pushes a hand back through his hair.

“She is my daughter.” He grimaces deeper. “This is her choice.”

Thor leans forward, gentles Loki’s disordered hair back into something more like its preferred slick style. “She will do us both proud,” he murmurs. She is young, of course – terribly so, by Asgardian standard. For all they pass through infancy in what seems a blink of the eye, adolescence lasts centuries. Thor could never have imagined doing this so young.

_But then Frith is not what you were. She is her own person, and her choices are not like yours. They are her own._

And he remembers well how it had been, when the very afternoon of her birth Loki had risen from the bed to walk deep into Iðunn’s orchards. He’d denied all Thor’s support despite the lines of tension and pain and exhaustion upon his pale features, but had allowed his brother to help as they’d dug together deep into damp soil. There, hands together, they had lowered the placenta to the earth and covered it over – and while their daughter had slept beneath the watchful eyes of her grandparents they had poured the waters of Urðr’s well over the mound, and there watched settle the snow-white clay that so feeds Yggdrasil true.

“I never doubted she would not,” Loki says, almost scornful. But his arms cross tight over the golden lunula upon his chest, and his eyes narrow as he watches Odin and Frith fuss over Sleipnir’s gold-woven mane. “Are _you_ content to stay here, however? The great warrior across all the worlds, bound always to a golden throne?”

“Father will not sleep forever, even if this will be longer than ever before. He never has, no?”

When Loki tilts his gaze to him, Thor suspects perhaps he knows the truth already. Something in that knowing gaze is both playful and promising, underlain with a pride that makes him grin like the fool Loki has so often named him.

But there is no time to say anything more. Odin has raised a hand in greeting, and when Loki and Thor turn it is to watch the approach of their mother, and a red-haired young woman at her side. Even amongst the Aesir she is a startling beauty, with pale skin like milk and hair all ablaze about slim shoulders in her gown of white and pale blue. It moves like a waterfall, coursing freely over every curve and dip of the body beneath.

He takes the hand she offers, bows his head low as he presses lips to the cool fingers. “My Lady Vár,” he murmurs, and when he looks up her smile is the gentle play of the tide incoming.

“My Lord Thor.”

Frith’s arm comes tight about her waist, disrupting the easy formality between those who are and have been rulers of their own lands. “There’s no need to stand on ceremony with Papa,” she says, and Vár rolls her lovely eyes even as Frith’s gaze flitters sideways. “Mother, on the other hand…”

Indeed, when Loki and Vár greet one another, it is with perfect poise and grace. Vár is aware of the circumstances of her mother’s death, but her nature has never permitted her to lay blame where theory might deign it is due. Indeed she smiles as she takes her leave of Loki and turns to his daughter. Vár reaches forward and Frith reaches back until they come together, hands held loose; since Vár’s return to Asgard as ward to the throne the two have been twins in spirit, if not in name nor blood. The fire and the ember, though both blaze so bright as to threaten to consume everything in their dual orbit.

They return to Sleipnir, Vár frowning over the ceremonial tack he has been garbed in; Loki moves forward with Odin, masters both in the attiring of the magnificent horse. Thor remains behind, feels the approach of his mother. “Midgard might come to regret such an offer,” he says with a wry grin, and her hand is gentle understanding upon his arm.

“You have your duties here, my son.” One hand rises, adjusting an imagined dropped curl. “And those girls have lives of their own to carve upon the trunk and branches of Yggdrasil.”

“Exit, pursued by a squirrel,” Thor mutters, and his mother gives him a peculiar look.

“Hmm?”

“I…it was something Loki said, when all was decided. Though I do believe it was Barton who said so first. Or perhaps Stark.” Rueful, Thor rubs at his head and gives his mother a perfectly helpless look. “I never do understand the half of what those two come up with.”

She nods, looks back again to where her granddaughter is watching the Allfather rework one of Sleipnir’s braids with a fussiness that makes her smile. “We must have Agent Barton to stay, again.”

Certainly it might distract Loki, at least. Though not one for flyting in the fashion of Loki and Bragi, Barton has a quick enough tongue to hold his own in any verbal joust; it is simply that he tends more to be observer than active participant. The latter is more Stark’s way, but then age is creeping in upon the mortal allies Loki had brought to their cause. Every time he has been upon Midgard in recent years, it has become more disturbing and obvious to his eyes. In that, at least, he finds some relief in that Vár and Frith are taking his place amongst the Avengers. His place is to be here instead, amongst the golden fields and spires of Asgard.

“Do you regret it?”

Frigga stills, the long curls of her hair like rose gold in the rising sun of this day, when everything will change again. She has always been beauty upon the fire, ever knowing of when to burn and when to blaze. And it is not the first time he has asked such a question. At first there is a light sigh, air given over to join the light spring-scented breeze that stirs the grass and leaves of the meadow and the forest beyond its northern border.

“Yes,” she then breathes. “And no.” A smile, tremulous and tender, gathers upon her rose-coloured lips. “I regret the choices he made with the opportunity I gave, perhaps. But I shall never regret that he had the chance enough to make them.”

Frith has mounted Sleipnir once more with a leg-up from her grandfather; Vár rides behind her, loose red hair bannering to the sky as Frith spurs him to a canter. Together they are two queens to one day sit thrones in distant lands. He cannot imagine them separated, now.

“It is the lot of a mother,” Frigga says, soft and sorrowful, “to stand by and watch as one’s children grow tall, and walk away, letting go of the hand that taught them those first trembling steps.”

One calloused hand slips into hers, fitting there as easily now as it had when it was but the chubby paw of a small boy. “We are here yet.”

A knowing smile gives her greater beauty than fine bone structure and lovely skin might ever do. She has always known so much, their mother. “That is the selfish pleasure of a queen. Knowing that the throne will bind her eldest to her always, that the weave will bring him to the place where his father once reigned.”

“And your second, too.” Mjölnir is a sure weight about his hip as he shifts, shades his eyes with his hands to see that Loki stands at Odin’s side. “I…only wish he could have asked. That he could have believed whatever answer he was given in return.”

“Perhaps I am untrue, when I say that I did not realise Loki would go so far.” Her long pale hands tangle before her heart, and she looks unblinkingly into the sun, to her child and her husband. “The weave is always true, at its heart.”

“Then you knew what he would do?”

“I knew better what he _might_ do, should I not pull the weave into something else.” When she looks back, her eyes are bright with tears, but she wears the smile of a queen and a mother and a woman who stands truest at the heart and hearth of her home. “I saw what would have become of you both.” Then she looks back, and Thor sees a single tear fall, as if from some great distance. “This…this was better.”

“For all he suffered?”

“For all we suffered.”

No, this is not the first time they have spoken of such things, but this is the first time he has ever dared ask this. “What did you see?”

“You know I cannot tell you that.” And her fingers are light upon his cheek, her eyes dry now. “Do you believe I was right?”

“Mother,” and at first he cannot speak, trapped in the sorrow of the eyes whose bright blue shade she had given to him. _But I never see what you see; that is the greatest gift you have given me, as my mother._ He clears his throat. “I’ve learned that parents can never hope to be infallible.” Again he stumbles, and then tries again. “But I also know what one will do for love of a child. It is that love that gives us strength.” And he smiles. “And you are the strongest person I know.”

In the end he holds her, tucked into his side. Then she reaches up, and he obediently leans forward so she might press her lips to his forehead. Then she crosses the meadow, skirts brushing the grass as if they are the sunlight that dances upon it.

In her wake Loki returns to him; such gravitation to one another is as natural as the turn of Yggdrasil itself. Thor will not regret it. The choices have been made, and he would not have it any other way.

_We have paid our price._

“He adores her,” Thor says, soft, and Loki nods. His arms are crossed again over his chest, and Thor knows his quick mind is still moving through the intricacies of the farewell feast for Frith and her companion Vár.

“He does,” Loki murmurs, and Thor must swallow hard before he can give voice to the next question, quiet and unsure.

“Was it that you feared it was but a chance occurrence, one that could never be repeated? Is that why you would not risk it again?”

Loki stiffens. It is not something they have spoken of, since that day a year on from Frith’s birth when Loki had said he would never carry another child. Then, he speaks low, as sure as he is sorrowful. “We changed Frith’s future, yes – but not without great risk, and great expenditure of life.” He closes his eyes, leans against him, the curve of his body reassurance and forgiveness both. “I fear our son would be but the return to the prophecy.”

“Do you wish for him all the same?”

He smiles into the darkness, one hand seeking his and holding tight. “Always.”

At first Thor cannot speak except with the movement of his body, drawing Loki closer, pressing lips to throat and jaw and the pulse of his strong heart. “I would fight for him. For _you_.”

“And that is why I do not ask.” Loki twists in his arms so that they stand pressed together from hip to chest, both exasperated and gratified as he catches his face between his palms. “No, Thor, even I know when one must be content with what they have.”

Thor’s own hands are tight about his waist. “You have me always. And Frith. And Asgard.”

“Mmm.”

The distance in his eyes trembles through him, and in that Thor knows sudden true fear. “What?”

“I am a force of chaos, brother mine.” Something almost like pity moves in his eyes, even as Loki moves closer yet. “You cannot expect me to stay here forever.”

“But we’ve changed the heart of Asgard itself.” It’s a leading question, and he can see sudden understanding bloom in his brother’s sly gaze. “Surely that must be enough for even you.”

“Perhaps.” The lips against his are a smile that tastes of laughter like the waters of deepest wisdom, curled tight against him, the other half of a whole made real. “For now.”

“Yes,” he says, and he wants to shout his laughter to the sky, to rend the blue with silver and thick thunder. “The Allfather will not sleep forever.”

Loki’s laugh is as strong and wild and free as the hand that closes about his, as it had done when they were children, running off to adventure with no thought at all to consequence. Their daughter rides yet in the distance, her boon companion at her side on this the day they will go to Midgard in their parents’ name. And somewhere far below the branches of Yggdrasil, at the base of a snow-white ash, the Norns gather about their well to do ever their work.

_Let them_ , Thor thinks, and holds his brother closer yet. _I have my own, and in this I am forever content._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...and lo, we have reached the ending. I began this all the way back in April with no real idea of what I was doing, and figured that I'd have maybe a hundred k by July and would be done.
> 
> Apparently not.
> 
> I have to say upfront that I am so very glad and grateful for all the comments and kudos I have received on this fic, especially given the sheer volume of talent in this particular fandom. I am always humbled to think that anyone at all would read a thing I write, and despite my numerous breakdowns over this fic you've stayed with me this far, and I am just amazed by it. Thank you for your support; it means more to me than you will likely ever know.
> 
> I can only but hope this ending is as happy, inasmuch as these two can ever have one of those. I'm also not so hot with OCs, so I apologise profusely if Frith fell flat for you. If you like, you can ignore the epilogue altogether; in a lot of ways it exists only because SOMEONE wanted heavily pregnant sex, and it didn't fit in anywhere else. And hell, I should just admit so much of this fic exists just an excuse for me to hit up kinks I would never have written otherwise.
> 
> In all seriousness, however, I had hoped to write something complex -- particularly given I always figured Loki and his machinations were never something I could write to any large degree. In the end I think I smothered poor Thor in them, perhaps to the point where they ended up both wildly OOC, but I did try, and here we are...?
> 
> This is the last longfic I will write for this fandom, and possibly is the last thing I'll post on AO3. I do write drabbles that I post on tumblr that rarely make it here, and I have a little collection of stories to write for posting on Christmas Day; you're quite welcome to stalk [my fictag](http://claricechiarasorcha.tumblr.com/tagged/filthy+fanfic+feels/) if you're at all interested. Otherwise, thank you so much for making this fandom experience an amazing one for a writer who does best in unobtrusive shadow, blinded by the brightness of everyone so much better about her. Thank you. It means so much to me, and you will never know how deeply I mean that.
> 
> You are all wonderful. Be well, always, and know that I love you. <3


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